How to Find Someone’s Age Without Asking: Tips and Tricks

Cindy Ellis - August 28, 2022

Age is a sensitive subject for many people, and individuals will often stay away from discussing age due to politeness and respect for others. After all, you never know when directly asking someone their age will cause offense or upset them. That being said, there are some situations in which you need to know an individual’s age, such as evaluating their suitability for dating or ensuring that you have their birthday correct to give a gift or card.

In today’s world, discovering someone’s age without asking them isn’t as difficult as it may seem at first. There are a variety of different methods that can be used to track down someone’s age subtly and accurately.

Our article gives you the best tips to find someone’s age in the easiest ways possible.

Why Would You Need to Know Someone’s Age?

Many people may feel weird about trying to find another individual’s age, but this is actually a fairly common practice. There are several reasons why you may want to know someone’s age and are trying to avoid asking them directly due to politeness or because you don’t want to potentially offend them.

Dating

In the world of online dating or when meeting someone in person, it can be hard to get a grasp on your potential partner’s exact age. Plus, there is a chance that individuals lie about their age online, making it all the more important to confirm your dating partner’s exact age for safety reasons. However, if you don’t want to ask them directly or wait for it to come up naturally in conversation, you can utilize more subtle methods of researching an individual’s name.

Confirm Birthdays

Often, the birthdays of friends, distant relatives, and acquaintances may slip your mind until the very last minute when you need to show up with a gift or cake. This can be a problem when you don’t quite remember the age of the individual, and you don’t want to offend them or let them know that you have forgotten by asking directly.

Using research tactics to find the person’s age can help you find their birthday and send a card or cake without them ever knowing you forgot their exact age.

Curiosity

If you’ve met a new friend, gained a new mentor at work, or recently regained contact with a distant friend or relative, you may be curious about their age. Knowing someone’s age can help you relate to them and figure out what life experiences you share, but outright asking before you get to know someone well may be off-putting to the other party.

To satisfy your curiosity about the new person in your life and figure out their age, you can use our search tactics below to quietly find this information without bothering the other person.

The Best Ways to Discover Someone’s Age

Finding someone’s age isn’t the most challenging thing to do these days, but you may not know where to start when it comes to research. For the most part, you can easily find someone’s age by searching online or through public records – we give you the exact steps for all of these different research methods below.

Conversation and Observation

One of the best indirect ways of figuring out a person’s age is by carefully paying attention to the person in question and asking questions that may trigger them to reveal their age or discuss things pertinent to their generation. Topics and leading questions that you can ask include:

• Talk about technology, such as the first phones or computers you owned or the oldest technology you remember using. Doing so can prompt a conversation that gives you insight into the other person’s age.
• Complain about your own age, as this will often prompt the other party into commiserating and speaking about their age or their memories of when they were your age, allowing you to guesstimate how much older or younger the person is.
• Pay attention to the other person’s interests; if they love clubbing and going out to bars, they may fit in with a younger crowd, but if they love to engage in quieter, more low-key activities, they may be older. This is not foolproof, however, as people from all walks of life enjoy varying activities, but it can point you in the right direction.
• Ask them about their life or their parents. The other person’s life story will likely include information about when they grew up, when their parents were born, and relative things at the time of their growing up, such as pop culture, trends, and technology. All of this may allow you to gain a sense of their age.

Just keep in mind that asking many indirect questions related to age, technology, and time periods they may have lived through can tip them off that you are trying to figure out their age and may upset them more than asking them openly would have. So be careful when making conversation, and utilize one of our other more subtle methods instead if you really don’t want the other person to know you are trying to figure out their age.

Searching Social Media

Social media is one of the easiest places to start searching for someone’s age, especially as many social media websites ask you to input your birthday or the year you were born during the sign-up process. Keep in mind that the individual in question will need to have this information set publically on their social media account for you to see it, but as ‘public’ is the default, there is a good chance the individual left it that way.

Facebook is your best chance for figuring out someone’s age due to the ‘about’ section listing their birthday, education and graduation information, and employment information, as long as the person has filled these areas out. LinkedIn may also be a good place to search, with other social media websites like Twitter and Instagram being less helpful unless you can find posts about their birthday on them. Apps like TikTok or Snapchat can be even harder, but they can still be useful in your search.

Keep in mind that you will likely need an account on these social media websites as well and may even need to be connected or ‘friends’ with the person online if you want to search the person’s name and view their profile easily.

Asking Mutual Friends and Relatives

Another simple indirect way of finding someone’s age is speaking with mutual friends or relatives that you have. This method allows you to easily find the age of the person in question without in-depth internet research. But it does run a risk of getting back to the person if your mutual friends or relatives inform them that you were asking about their age.

If you want to be sure that your search for their age stays private, then you should engage in a different research method.

Use Public Record Searches

A simple way of finding someone’s age that doesn’t require social media browsing or lengthy research is using a public record search tool like Information.com. This tool will allow you to input the person’s name, phone number, or email address into the search bar and will then pull up all the publicly available information about that person that can be found online.

The results will typically include a birthdate, known social media accounts, education and employment history, prior addresses, and known friends, relatives, and associates. From this information, you will be able to figure out their exact age or gain a sense of their age by looking through their education and employment history if their birthdate isn’t included.

Figuring Out Someone’s Age the Subtle Way

When it comes to discussing age, many individuals may find this a sensitive topic and be unwilling to share their exact age, while others may find it rude that you have directly asked for their age in the first place. In these cases, you can use the tips we discuss in our article to figure out someone’s age subtly and without asking them directly.

Whether you need to know someone’s age to evaluate their suitability as a dating partner, to determine your compatibility, or just out of curiosity, figuring out someone’s age tactfully can be done if you use our advice.