Time Spent Playing Games and Using a Computer for Leisure (ATUS, Ages 15–24)

## What this measures

Average hours per day that Americans aged 15 to 24 spend playing games (including video and computer games) and using a computer for leisure, from the BLS American Time Use Survey. Annual, 2003 onward.

## Why it matters

Time is fixed at 24 hours, so hours on screens come from somewhere: sleep, work, people, other leisure. Read next to time spent socializing in person (`bls_atus_socializing_15_24`) it shows how Americans' free time has been reallocated since 2003.

## How to read it

Average hours per day across all days of the year (weekdays, weekends and holidays) for everyone in the group, including people who did none of the activity that day. BLS published no 2020 annual estimate (collection was suspended in spring 2020), so the series skips that year. Single-year changes of a few hundredths of an hour are within sampling noise; read the trend over five years or more.

## What it does not say

Time diaries record what people did and for how long, as the main activity. They do not record how people felt. ATUS codes an activity by what was done, not by the device, and screens used while doing something else count only under the main activity. The 15 to 24 sample is a fraction of the full survey, so single years swing more than the all-ages line. It does not separate phones from computers or social media from other browsing.

## Source

US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey, annual averages (series `TUU10101AA01021211` + `TUU10101AA01021432`), https://www.bls.gov/tus/. Public domain; BLS asks to be cited as the source. Fetched by bls-sync from the BLS public API. BLS publishes the two parts for ages 15 to 24 but not their total, so Palanor adds them: games plus computer use for leisure. For all persons the published combined line (`TUU10101AA01016299`) equals the sum of its two parts in every year to the hundredth.