How to Meet People After Moving to a New City When You Don’t Know Anyone

Moving somewhere new resets your social life to zero, and the usual advice — "join a gym," "say yes to things" — undersells how slow and awkward that process actually is at the start.

Most of that advice also assumes you already have somewhere to direct the energy. "Say yes to things" only works if people are actually inviting you to things, and in a new city, for the first few months, mostly nobody is. That’s the part nobody warns you about before you move.

Why the first few months are the hardest

There’s no shared context yet. Most of the social circles you’d normally tap into — coworkers, neighbors — take months to turn into actual friendships. It takes roughly 50 hours together to become casual friends, and 200+ to become close ones, and going out alone repeatedly gets old fast.

Those hours also don’t accumulate in a straight line. A coworker you see forty hours a week might still not clear the casual-friend threshold if none of that time is unstructured, and a neighbor you wave at daily might never clear it at all. Proximity isn’t the same as the kind of time that actually builds a friendship.

What the first month actually looks like

Week one is usually just logistics: unpacking, setting up utilities, figuring out where the grocery store is. There’s rarely bandwidth for socializing yet, and that’s fine, it’s not a failure to not have plans during move-in week.

By week two or three, the loneliest stretch tends to hit, once the logistics settle down but before any social momentum exists. This is usually the point where activity matching or a Local Buddy booking helps most, not because it replaces what’s coming later, but because it gives you one specific plan on the calendar instead of zero.

By month two, if you’ve joined even one recurring thing, a class, a league, a standing coffee, the earliest signs of a real social rhythm start to show up. It’s slow and mostly invisible while it’s happening, which is exactly why it’s worth tracking against a realistic timeline instead of judging it week to week.

Free option: activity-based matching

Activity matching skips the slow-build phase. Instead of waiting for a group to form organically, you find someone who already wants to do the specific thing you want to do — a habit Cigna’s research links to better resilience against loneliness — this week, not "eventually." Here’s how to actually find one of those matches.

It also gives you a reason to actually explore the new city rather than sticking to the same three-block radius around your apartment. A hiking trail on the edge of town, a running club, a board game meetup, any of these get you out into parts of the city you wouldn’t otherwise have a reason to visit, and you meet someone in the process.

Paid option: a local companion for the first stretch

Booking a Local Buddy for a few hours isn’t a replacement for building real friendships — it’s a way to get a local’s actual context (which neighborhoods are worth it, honest restaurant opinions, how the city really works) faster than you’d get it alone, while you build the rest.

It’s particularly useful in the first two or three weeks specifically, before you’ve built enough local knowledge to even know what to look for. A couple of hours with someone who already lives there can save weeks of trial and error on things like which gym has the good classes or which part of town actually matches your budget and commute. If you’re not sure what an actual booking looks like, here’s what to expect from a local companion booking step by step.

A realistic timeline

Set your expectations accordingly: a solid social circle in a new city typically takes six to twelve months to feel real, which lines up with why half of US adults report lacking companionship often or some of the time. Activity matching and local companionship shorten the lonely stretch at the start — they don’t skip it entirely, and that’s fine.

Staying safe while doing all of this

Every option above involves meeting strangers in person, so the same rules apply throughout: verified profiles, public first meetings, and a Vibe Check afterward. Full details are in our Trust & Safety guide and our guide to staying safe meeting anyone from an app.

It’s worth being a little more deliberate about this than usual in the first few weeks after a move, precisely because you don’t yet have the local knowledge to judge a neighborhood or a venue the way you would back home. Sticking to well-reviewed, populated public spots for early meetups is a reasonable extra layer of caution while you’re still learning the city yourself.

A quick self-check before your first booking

It helps to be honest with yourself about what you actually need before booking anything. If the goal is a specific plan for a specific day, an activity match is usually the better fit. If the goal is a local’s broader context on the city, restaurants, neighborhoods, what the area is actually like, a paid Local Buddy booking tends to deliver more of that in a single sitting.

Either way, the first one or two bookings tend to feel the most unfamiliar, and that’s normal. It generally gets easier by the second or third time, simply because the format stops being new.