What age do people typically start masturbating?
Nobody wrote the date down. Everything known about when people start comes from adults and teenagers being asked to remember, and the answers split by sex in a way most people put down to anatomy, when the research points at puberty and at what each sex was told was allowed. The share who say they've never done it at all is bigger than you'd guess, too. Enter the age you remember and see how many people had started before you did. This calculator on Find The Norm uses Herbenick et al. (2010) Journal of Sexual Medicine data (N=5,865) and the Swedish high school study (N=3,018) to rank your first-masturbation age against population norms by gender.
Querying population data…
And the current frequency?
How often people your age and sex do it, from the NSSHB.
What is the average age of first masturbation?
Somewhere between 12 and 15 for most men and between 14 and 18 for most women, according to the retrospective surveys and the Indiana University data this page draws on, though no nationally representative study has pinned the exact age down with anything like the precision NHANES brings to height or weight. The evidence comes from two places. Adults and young adults were asked, years after the fact, how old they were, in studies that include the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) run by Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, and teenagers were asked while still at school. Both routes lean on memory of something private that nobody dated at the time, so treat any single year as a centre of gravity, and treat the percentile this page gives you as a coarser thing than the one on a height chart.
The Swedish senior high school study (Driemeyer et al., 2017: 52 schools, 1,566 women and 1,452 men aged 18 to 22) is one of the better datasets on adolescent onset because it asked young people still at school, while the memory was fresh. It lines up with the NSSHB on the gender gap, and the usual explanation has two parts, boys reaching puberty with an unmistakable physical signal, and a culture that talked openly about male masturbation while treating the female version as improper or nonexistent. Among younger cohorts the gap looks to be narrowing as those attitudes shift, which matches what's happening to masturbation frequency across the same groups.
What percentage of people have never masturbated?
About 10.4% of men and 23.3% of women, in the 2021 national survey Herbenick and colleagues published in 2023, which makes "never" an ordinary answer in a large national sample, and one this calculator can't place on its curve because there's no age to enter. The share is higher among older women than younger ones. Women who came of age in the middle of the last century were told, more or less in so many words, that female masturbation was improper or didn't exist, and plenty carried that with them. The NSSHB 2021 wave shows the generations pulling together, with younger women reporting lifetime prevalence much closer to men's.
"Never" doesn't need explaining away. Some people aren't interested and some hold religious or cultural views that rule it out. Clinicians describe masturbation as normal, which is a statement about the people who do it and says nothing against the people who don't.
Why do men start earlier than women?
Because boys get a signal girls don't, in that the start of spontaneous erections and ejaculation at puberty points a boy's attention straight at his own body, while the changes of female puberty don't direct attention toward genital self-stimulation in the same reflexive way, and because the culture around each sex has told a different story about whether it's allowed. Boys grow up hearing masturbation discussed and joked about, so there's a script waiting for them. Girls historically got no script at all, or one that said the behaviour was unacceptable, and a behaviour with no script starts later.
The Swedish study found the gender difference across its 52 schools, though once the researchers grouped students by pattern rather than by sex, a large share of young men and women turned out to report similar experiences. What the study can't tell you is what happens after school, since it stopped asking at senior high school age, so the women who start in their twenties, covered in the questions below, sit outside its frame entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, in the sense developmental researchers mean. Young children touch and explore themselves, that's documented across cultures, and it's a different thing from the adult-patterned masturbation that starts around puberty and that this calculator asks about. There's no clinical line for "too early" in childhood exploration. Explicit sexual behaviour in a young child is a separate matter and can point to something else going on, which is where a paediatrician comes in.
Nothing in the available research ties a later start to worse sexual function or satisfaction as an adult. Onset age swings widely with upbringing and biology, and for women a later start is the common case, since 14 to 18 is the typical band. Growing up religious, or somewhere the subject was never mentioned, pushes the age up without any cost to sexual health that anyone has measured.
Yes, in the NSSHB. Adolescents reported less solo masturbation in the 2018 wave than in 2009 (Herbenick et al., 2022), and the gap between the sexes started wide: in 2009, 73.8% of boys and 48.1% of girls aged 14 to 17 said they had ever masturbated (Robbins et al., 2011). Changed attitudes toward female sexuality and easier access to information are the usual explanations offered for any narrowing since.
Yes, and it's one of the stronger predictors the NSSHB has. People raised in religiously conservative homes start later and are more likely never to have masturbated, with very religious adults reporting lifetime abstinence well above the general figures of 10.4% for men and 23.3% for women. Religious people vary a lot among themselves, though, and an answer given in a religious context is under more pressure to sound respectable, so some of the gap is reporting.
A weak one. People who start masturbating earlier tend, modestly, to have their sexual debut earlier as well, but the link is too loose to predict anything about one person and nobody has shown which way it runs. Both could follow from the same thing, an earlier puberty or a stronger sexual interest.
More than anything else biological. Earlier puberty means an earlier start in both sexes. The 12 to 15 band for boys sits on top of the typical age of first ejaculation and early pubertal development. Girls' later, wider 14 to 18 band reflects later puberty on average and the lack of any single event to match first ejaculation. Puberty has been arriving earlier across most high-income countries, which may explain part of the generational drift in onset age.
Almost certainly. People underreport private and stigmatised behaviour when asked to remember it, and masturbation onset is about as private as survey questions get. Women are under more pressure to sound respectable, so their onset ages and lifetime figures are probably shaded later and lower than the truth. The NSSHB runs anonymously online, which gets more honest answers than an interviewer in the room, and even so the real prevalence is likely higher than reported and the gender gap smaller.
No hard cut-off, though the odds of a first time fall steadily with age. Most men who will ever masturbate have started by their early 20s. Women starting in their late 20s or 30s show up in the data far more often than men do, because the permission and the information arrived later for them. Adults starting in middle age or beyond are a small minority, and mostly women who met the idea late, through a relationship or through therapy.
As an ordinary part of development, with information matched to age. The frameworks from SIECUS and the WHO Regional Office for Europe both include it, on the evidence that accurate information cuts shame and produces better sexual health outcomes than abstinence-only teaching. Their recommended line is that masturbation is common and normal, and that the wide spread in when people start and how often is normal too. Research keeps finding the shame does more harm than the behaviour.
Nothing that matters clinically. An early start doesn't predict a higher adult frequency or a more satisfying sex life, and a late start doesn't predict dysfunction or trouble with partnered sex. Onset age comes from your biology and from what you were told and when, and says little about the adult you became. The NSSHB, the largest and most careful dataset on the question, finds no association between onset age and adult sexual health once demographics and relationships are accounted for.
It peaks between the late teens and mid-30s and falls gradually after that without reaching zero, since a real share of adults in their 70s and beyond still report masturbating now and then, according to the NSSHB. The fall is steeper in people with partners, where partnered sex takes over some of the role, and steeper in men than in women. Women's frequency holds up better with age, so the gap between the sexes narrows in later life.
- Herbenick D et al. 2010. National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB). Journal of Sexual Medicine. N=5,865
- Herbenick D et al. 2022. Changes in penile-vaginal intercourse frequency and sexual repertoire from 2009 to 2018 (NSSHB). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 51(3), 1419 to 1433. N=4,547 (2018 wave)
- Herbenick D, Fu TC, Wasata R, Coleman E. 2023. Masturbation prevalence, frequency, reasons, and associations with partnered sex in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52(3), 1317 to 1331. PMC9794105. N=3,743 (2021 survey)
- Driemeyer W, Janssen E, Wiltfang J, Elmerstig E. 2017. Masturbation experiences of Swedish senior high school students: gender differences and similarities. Journal of Sex Research, 54(4 to 5), 631 to 641. 52 schools, N=3,018
- Robbins CL et al. 2011. Prevalence, frequency, and associations of masturbation with partnered sexual behaviors among US adolescents. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 165(12), 1087 to 1093
- No survey records the exact age of first masturbation for a whole population, so the comparison here is approximate. This calculator gives population context and isn't medical advice.