← Back to Calculator

About How Picky Are You

What Is This?

How Picky Are You is a fun, data-driven tool that estimates how many people actually match your dating preferences. Enter your dealbreakers — age range, height, income, education, and more — and see how your dating pool shrinks with each filter.

It's a reality check wrapped in a calculator. Sometimes your standards are totally reasonable. Sometimes you're looking for a unicorn. Either way, it's good to know.

How It Works

The calculator applies each of your filters as an independent probability. For every filter you enable, it calculates the percentage of the population that passes, then multiplies them together to get your final match count.

For example, if 50% of people match your age range and 30% match your height preference, that's roughly 15% of the population (0.50 × 0.30). Add more filters and the number drops fast.

Everything runs entirely in your browser — no data is sent to any server.

Where Does the Data Come From?

We pull from the best publicly available sources for US demographics:

  • US Census Bureau — Population counts by age, sex, location, race, and household type
  • American Community Survey (ACS) — Income distributions, education levels, employment, and language data
  • CDC / NHANES — Height and weight distributions by age and sex
  • Pew Research Center — Religious affiliation and political leaning data
  • Bureau of Labor Statistics — Employment and occupation statistics

For international locations, we use UN population estimates and World Bank data. No individual-level data is ever used — only aggregate population statistics.

Is This Accurate?

It's a solid estimate, not an exact count. The calculator assumes filters are statistically independent, which isn't always true in real life (for example, income and education are correlated). But for a quick gut check on how selective your preferences are, it's surprisingly informative.

Think of it less as “exactly 4,231 people match you” and more as “your preferences eliminate 97% of the population.”

Why Build This?

Because everyone has opinions about what they want in a partner, but few people have done the math on what those preferences actually mean. We wanted to make that math accessible, visual, and — honestly — a little humbling.

It's also just fun to play with. Share your results with friends and compare how picky everyone is.

Open Source

How Picky Are You is built with Next.js and React. All calculations happen client-side in your browser. The demographic data is bundled with the application — no external API calls are made for calculations.

Contact

Have feedback, found a bug, or want to suggest a feature? Reach out at hello@howpickyareyou.com.