New Year's Resolution Statistics: 32 Figures With Sources

In the United States about three in ten adults make a New Year's resolution, and in Great Britain about two in ten: 30% of U.S. adults said they made one for 2024 (Pew Research Center, 5,140 adults), and 19% of British adults said in December 2025 that they would make one for 2026 (YouGov, 2,076 adults). In the one study that followed people for two years, 77% kept their resolution for a week and 19% for two years.

This page lists 32 figures on resolutions, goal setting and habits. Each one comes from the survey release or journal article that produced it, opened on 8 October 2026, and each is given with its year, its sample and its limits. A section near the end lists popular statistics we could not trace to a source, including "92% of resolutions fail".

Key figures

Figure	Source
30% of U.S. adults made at least one resolution for 2024	Pew Research Center, 2024
19% of British adults intended to make one for 2026	YouGov, 2025
79% of U.S. resolution makers made one about health	Pew Research Center, 2024
77% kept a resolution for one week, 19% for two years	Norcross and Vangarelli, 1988
55% rated themselves successful after one year	Oscarsson and others, 2020
A median of 66 days for a daily behaviour to become automatic, with a range of 18 to 254 days	Lally and others, 2010
People were 145.3% more likely to commit to a goal at the start of a year	Dai, Milkman and Riis, 2014

How many people make New Year's resolutions?

United States, 2024. Pew Research Center asked 5,140 U.S. adults between 16 and 21 January 2024. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.

• 30% made at least one resolution for 2024. Half of them made more than one.
• 70% made none. Of those, 56% said the main reason is that they don't like making resolutions.
• By age: 49% of adults aged 18 to 29 made a resolution, 31% of those aged 30 to 49, and 21% of those aged 50 and older.

United States, 2026. YouGov asked 1,104 U.S. adult citizens between 9 and 11 December 2025, with a margin of error of about 4 percentage points.

• 31% said they would make a resolution or set a goal for 2026.
• 43% of adults under 45 said so, against 21% of those aged 45 and older.

Great Britain, 2026. YouGov asked 2,076 British adults on 14 and 15 December 2025.

• 19% intended to make a resolution for 2026, 66% did not, and 15% didn't know.
• 37% of 18 to 24 year olds intended to, against 11% of people over 65.

The Pew survey asked in January what people had done. The two YouGov surveys asked in December what people planned to do, in different countries and with different questions. They aren't a trend line and shouldn't be compared point for point.

What do people resolve to do?

United States, 2024 (Pew). Among people who made a resolution, with more than one answer allowed:

Topic	Share of resolution makers
Health, exercise or diet	79%
Money or finances	61%
Relationships with family or friends	57%
Hobbies or personal interests	55%
Work or career	49%

United States, 2026 (YouGov). The most common resolutions out of 25 offered were exercising more (25%), being happy (23%), eating healthier (22%), saving more money (21%) and improving physical health (21%). These are shares of all Americans, not of people who make resolutions.

Great Britain, 2026 (YouGov). The 385 people who planned a resolution described it in their own words: 23% wanted to get fit or exercise more, 17% to lose weight, 11% to eat more healthily and 7% to save more or spend less.

Sweden, 2017. In a study of 1,066 people who signed up to take part, the most common resolutions concerned physical health (33%), weight loss (20%) and eating habits (13%).

How long do resolutions last?

There is no single failure rate. The answer depends on when you ask, who you ask and what counts as success.

When asked	Result	Source and sample
After 1 week	77% had kept their resolution	Norcross and Vangarelli, 1988; 200 U.S. resolvers
Under 1 month	59% said they had kept all their resolutions, 28% some, 13% none	Pew Research Center, 2024; U.S. adults who made a resolution
After 6 months	46% were continuously successful	Norcross and others, 2002; 159 resolvers
Mid-December	38% said they had kept all, 33% some, 24% none	YouGov, 2025; 229 British adults who recalled making a resolution for 2025
After 1 year	55% of those who answered rated themselves successful	Oscarsson and others, 2020; Sweden
After 2 years	19% had kept their resolution	Norcross and Vangarelli, 1988

Three more findings from the same studies:

• Resolving beats only wanting to change. At six months, 46% of people who made a resolution were continuously successful, against 4% of people who wanted to change a problem but made no resolution (Norcross and others, 2002).
• Slips are normal. 53% of the people who succeeded over two years slipped at least once, and the average number of slips was 14 (Norcross and Vangarelli, 1988).
• "Start" goals did better than "stop" goals. 58.9% of people whose resolution was to start or do something rated themselves successful after a year, against 47.1% of people whose resolution was to stop or avoid something (Oscarsson and others, 2020).

People expect to succeed. Of Americans planning a resolution for 2026, 39% said it was very likely they would keep it all year and 50% somewhat likely (YouGov, 2025).

All of these are self-reports. The one-year figure of 55% counts only people who answered the follow-up, and the people in that study had signed up themselves.

What helps people reach a goal?

These come from meta-analyses, which pool many experiments. They report an effect size (d) and not a percentage. By the usual convention, 0.2 is a small effect, 0.5 a medium one and 0.8 a large one.

Finding	Effect	Source
Prompting people to monitor their progress improved goal attainment	d = 0.40	Harkin and others, 2016; 138 studies, 19,951 people
Setting a goal had a small positive effect on behaviour	d = 0.34	Epton, Currie and Armitage, 2017; 141 papers, 16,523 people
Group goals improved group performance	d = 0.56	Kleingeld and others, 2011; 49 effect sizes
Specific, difficult group goals against vague ones	d = 0.80	Kleingeld and others, 2011; 23 effect sizes

The progress-monitoring review also found that monitoring "had larger effects on goal attainment when the outcomes were reported or made public, and when the information was physically recorded". That is the case for measuring progress somewhere you can see it.

Support from other people. In a weight-loss trial with 166 people, 76% of those who joined alone finished the programme and 24% kept their weight loss in full over the following six months. Among those who joined with friends and got extra social support, 95% finished and 66% kept the loss in full (Wing and Jeffery, 1999).

Writing goals down. A study at Dominican University of California asked five groups to work on goals for four weeks; 149 of 267 people finished. People who didn't write their goals down had a mean achievement score of 4.28. People who wrote them down scored 6.08, and people who wrote them down and sent a friend weekly progress reports scored 7.6. This is a university summary and not a journal article, the scores are self-ratings, and the summary doesn't state the scale, so the scores can't be turned into percentages.

Programmes wear off. In a test of 54 four-week programmes with 61,293 gym members, 45% of the programmes raised weekly gym visits, by 9% to 27%. Only 8% had an effect that could still be measured after the four weeks (Milkman and others, 2021).

How long does it take to form a habit?

• A median of 66 days, with a very wide range. In a study of 96 volunteers who repeated one daily behaviour, the time to reach 95% of a person's plateau of automaticity ranged from 18 to 254 days. The median was 66 days among the 39 people whose data fitted the model well (Lally and others, 2010).
• Other studies land in the same place. A 2024 review of 20 studies found median times of 59 to 66 days and mean times of 106 to 154 days, with individuals ranging from 4 to 335 days. It rated most of the studies as having a high risk of bias (Singh and others, 2024).
• Missing a day did little harm. In the 2010 study, missing one opportunity to do the behaviour "did not materially affect the habit formation process".
• For exercise: among 111 new gym members, at least four sessions a week for six weeks was the minimum needed to form an exercise habit (Kaushal and Rhodes, 2015).

So 66 days is the middle of one small study. It isn't a rule, and some people in that study needed far longer. If you're building a daily habit, the 30-day habit tracker and these habit ideas with a daily minimum are a place to start.

Does the new year help?

Researchers call it the fresh start effect: people take up goals at the start of a new period. One paper measured it in three data sets (Dai, Milkman and Riis, 2014). Each figure is the paper's estimate of the increase relative to baseline.

Behaviour	New week	New month	New year
Google searches for "diet" (United States, 2004 to 2012)	+14.4%	+3.7%	+82.1%
Probability of a gym visit (11,912 students at one university)	+33.4%	+14.4%	+11.6%
Signing a goal commitment contract (43,012 users of one website)	+62.9%	+23.6%	+145.3%

The gym figure for a new year is small because the gym belonged to a university: the start of a semester raised visits by 47.1%. The start of a week helps in all three, so you don't have to wait for January.

Statistics we could not trace to a source

Claim	What we found
"92% of resolutions fail" or "only 8% succeed", credited to the University of Scranton	We found no study that reports it. The two published studies from that university's researchers that we read report 19% success at two years and 46% at six months.
"People who write down their goals are 42% more likely to achieve them"	The Dominican University summary contains no 42%. It reports mean scores of 4.28 and 6.08. The second is 42% higher than the first, which is not the same as being 42% more likely to achieve a goal.
"It takes 21 days to form a habit"	We found no study behind it. The 2010 study and the 2024 review above both contradict it.
"It takes 66 days to form a habit"	66 days is a median from 39 people in one study, with a range of 18 to 254 days.
"A Harvard (or Yale) study found that the 3% of graduates with written goals earned ten times as much"	The Dominican University summary calls this an urban myth and says "no such study had ever been done".

We also left out any figure we could find only on a statistics round-up page and not in the original study or survey, and we use no numbers of our own: GoalTracker stores goals in your browser and never receives them.

How this page was put together

• Every figure was copied from the publisher's page, the full paper or the abstract on 8 October 2026.
• For nine of the studies only the abstract was read (Norcross 1988 and 2002, Harkin, Epton, Kleingeld, Wing, Singh, Kaushal, Milkman), so this page uses only numbers that appear in those abstracts.
• The surveys cover the United States and Great Britain, and one study is from Sweden. Nothing here describes other countries.
• Pew's 1.7-point margin of error applies to its full sample. Figures for age groups and for resolution makers have a wider margin, which Pew's methodology page doesn't state.
• Pew's topline shows the "kept all, some, none" question was put to the 791 people who made several resolutions. Its article reports the 59% for adults who made at least one. We quote the article.

If you use a figure from this page, cite the original source in the list below.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center (2024). New Year's resolutions: Who makes them and why. 5,140 U.S. adults, 16 to 21 January 2024. Methodology.
2. YouGov (2025). What are Americans' New Year's resolutions for 2026? 1,104 U.S. adult citizens, 9 to 11 December 2025.
3. YouGov (2025). What New Year's resolutions are Britons making for 2026? 2,076 British adults, 14 and 15 December 2025.
4. Norcross and Vangarelli (1988). The resolution solution: longitudinal examination of New Year's change attempts. Journal of Substance Abuse 1(2), 127-134. doi:10.1016/s0899-3289(88)80016-6
5. Norcross, Mrykalo and Blagys (2002). Auld lang syne: success predictors, change processes, and self-reported outcomes of New Year's resolvers and nonresolvers. Journal of Clinical Psychology 58(4), 397-405. doi:10.1002/jclp.1151
6. Oscarsson, Carlbring, Andersson and Rozental (2020). A large-scale experiment on New Year's resolutions. PLOS ONE 15(12), e0234097.
7. Harkin and others (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? Psychological Bulletin 142(2), 198-229. doi:10.1037/bul0000025
8. Epton, Currie and Armitage (2017). Unique effects of setting goals on behavior change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 85(12), 1182-1198. doi:10.1037/ccp0000260
9. Kleingeld, van Mierlo and Arends (2011). The effect of goal setting on group performance. Journal of Applied Psychology 96(6), 1289-1304. doi:10.1037/a0024315
10. Matthews, Dominican University of California (undated). Goals Research Summary.
11. Wing and Jeffery (1999). Benefits of recruiting participants with friends and increasing social support for weight loss and maintenance. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 67(1), 132-138. doi:10.1037//0022-006x.67.1.132
12. Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts and Wardle (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology 40(6), 998-1009. doi:10.1002/ejsp.674
13. Singh, Murphy, Maher and Smith (2024). Time to Form a Habit: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Health Behaviour Habit Formation and Its Determinants. Healthcare 12(23), 2488. doi:10.3390/healthcare12232488
14. Kaushal and Rhodes (2015). Exercise habit formation in new gym members: a longitudinal study. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 38(4), 652-663. doi:10.1007/s10865-015-9640-7
15. Dai, Milkman and Riis (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior. Management Science 60(10), 2563-2582.
16. Milkman and others (2021). Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science. Nature 600, 478-483. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-04128-4

Turn a resolution into steps

The studies above point the same way: pick something to start, split it into steps, write it down, check progress where you can see it, and expect slips. The New Year's resolution template turns one resolution into dated steps, and GoalTracker keeps the steps and a progress bar in your browser, free and with no account.

FAQ

What percentage of people make New Year's resolutions?

About 30% of U.S. adults made one for 2024 (Pew Research Center), and 19% of British adults planned one for 2026 (YouGov). Young adults are the most likely to: 49% of Americans aged 18 to 29.

What percentage of New Year's resolutions fail?

It depends on when you ask. In one U.S. study 77% of people kept their resolution for a week and 19% for two years. In a Swedish study 55% of those who answered rated themselves successful after a year. The often-quoted 92% has no study behind it that we could find.

What is the most common New Year's resolution?

Health. In Pew's 2024 survey 79% of U.S. resolution makers made a resolution about health, exercise or diet, ahead of money (61%) and relationships (57%).

How long does it take to form a habit?

In the best-known study the median was 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254 days. A 2024 review of 20 studies found medians of 59 to 66 days.

Does writing down goals help?

One university study found higher self-rated achievement for people who wrote goals down (6.08 against 4.28) and higher again for those who sent a friend weekly progress reports (7.6). 149 people finished it, it ran four weeks and it was not published in a journal.