Time spent in leisure activities in 2014, by gender, age, and educational attainment

On an average day in 2014, nearly everyone age 15 and over (96 percent) engaged in some sort of leisure activity such as watching TV, socializing, or exercising. Among those who engaged in leisure activities, men spent more time in these activities (6.0 hours) than did women (5.2 hours).

Watching TV was the leisure activity that occupied the most time, accounting for more than half of leisure time, on average. Men spent 3 hours per day watching TV, while women spent 2.6 hours. Socializing, such as visiting with friends or attending or hosting social events, was the next most common leisure activity, accounting for 0.7 hours per day for both men and women.

On average, adults age 75 and over spent 8.0 hours per day engaged in leisure activities—more than any other age group; 35- to 44-year-olds spent 4.1 hours engaged in leisure and sports activities—less than other age groups.

More from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Leisure Time Paradox

From the American Consumers Newsletter
by Cheryl Russell, Editorial Director, New Strategist Publications

You probably would scoff at the notion that you have more leisure time than your parents or grandparents did 40 years ago. But that's what time use studies show. Since 1965, men have gained 5.26 additional hours of leisure time per week. Women have an extra 3.56 hours compared to their counterparts in 1965. How come we don't feel more relaxed?

That question has been answered by an examination of trends in leisure time, published in Demography (August 2012). And the answer is: because the quality of our leisure time has declined. Simply put, we aren't having as much fun.

The analysis (by Almudena Sevilla, Jose I. Gimenez-Nadal, and Jonathan Gershuny) measures the quality of leisure time in three ways: pure leisure--or the amount of leisure time spent only in leisure activities with no accompanying non-leisure secondary activities (such as taking calls from your boss); co-present leisure (a better term might be social leisure)--or the amount of leisure time spent with a spouse or other adults but not children (who have a way of turning leisure into work); and leisure fragmentation--or the number of leisure intervals and their length.

The researchers discovered that our pure leisure time has declined, as has the time we spend in social leisure. "Despite general increases in leisure time, Americans report feeling increasingly harried now compared with 40 years ago," they note. "Our findings may help explain this paradox."

America's Laziest States 2010

Businessweek.com ranked the country's laziest states based on five years (2004-08) of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey, which averages the time spent each day on various activities across the population ages 15 and older, including people who did not do the activity at all. We evaluated the amount of leisure time spent on physically inactive pursuits, such as sleeping, watching television, relaxing, thinking, socializing, playing board games, and surfing the Internet (the U.S. average is 12 hours, 58 minutes). We considered these metrics against factors such as time spent exercising and playing sports in each state (the national average is 17 minutes), time spent working, and the state's median age. The final ranking only includes states where residents spend more free time doing sedentary activities than the U.S. average.

New York made the list.

Is work overrated?

US consumer time with media

This was a question posed on the BUSLIB listserv: How much time do americans spr=end on leisue=re? Here are some of the amswers.

This document provides a webliography and bibliography of a sampling of sources dealing with a wide range of aspects of the use of free time and covers various age groupings in the sources cited.

US Dept of Labor (Bureau of Labor Statistics) publishes the American Time Use Survey (which is where New Strategist's American Time Use gets most of their data. I love New Strategist's books since they sort through all the massive amounts of data


MPAA study, esp. page 24. (That was my suggestion.)

The Statistical Abstract has this data, extrapolated from the VSresearch.