How often do two people rate each other 8 or higher?

The numbers at a glance

RATE has no swiping. You rate people from 1 to 10, and if you give someone an 8, 9 or 10 and they give you an 8 or higher too, a private chat opens. That makes it possible to count something most apps can't show: how often a strong reaction is returned.

We looked at every pair of people where each has rated at least one of the other's posts, using the highest score each gave. There are 390 such pairs of a man and a woman. In about half, neither gave an 8. In 42.6%, one did and the other didn't. In 9.2%, both did.

Men give an 8 often, women rarely

Start with one direction at a time. A man has rated a woman in 3,231 pairs, and in 36.1% of them he gave at least one of her posts an 8 or higher. A woman has rated a man in 1,334 pairs, and in 11.3% of them she gave an 8 or higher. A high rating is about three times as likely from a man to a woman as the other way round.

This shapes everything else on the page. Since a match needs both, the rarer of the two ratings sets the limit. A woman's 8 is the scarce one.

The real bottleneck: has the other person seen you yet?

Here is the number that explains most "no match" outcomes. Of the 1,165 pairs where a man gave a woman an 8 or higher, she has rated any of his posts in only 166, which is 14.2%. In the rest she has not said no. She has not rated him at all.

The reason is arithmetic. Men far outnumber women among RATE's raters today, so a woman's feed holds far more men than she will get through, while a man has far fewer women to get through. Going the other way the wait is shorter: of the 151 pairs where a woman gave a man an 8 or higher, he has rated her back in 72, or 47.7%.

So far, 36 of the 1,165 pairs where a man rated a woman highly have become mutual (3.1%), against 36 of the 151 pairs where a woman rated a man highly (23.8%). They are the same 36 pairs, counted from each side. For a man, most of the distance between 3.1% and something better is waiting to be seen.

When both have rated each other

Once both people have actually rated each other, the picture is less lopsided. The table shows the 390 man-woman pairs. Pairs of the same gender who rated each other (261 of them) reach a mutual 8 at nearly the same rate, 8.4%. Whether any of these becomes a match depends on each person's match setting.

A mutual 8 in the ratings is not always a match in the app. A match also needs each person's "Match me with" setting to include the other, and people who follow each other are friends on RATE and are never matched. So the pairs in this table and the matches the app has made are close, but they are not the same thing.

If you rate someone highly, will they rate you highly?

Mostly, one has little to do with the other. Across all 1,302 two-way cases, the score A gave B and the score B gave A are unrelated (a correlation of 0.01, where 0 means no link and 1 means a perfect one). For man-woman pairs it is slightly negative, -0.17, which follows from what came earlier: men tend to rate women high while women tend to rate men in the middle.

There is one small exception at the top. When someone gave an 8 or higher and the other person had rated them too, the 8 came back 35.0% of the time. Across all two-way cases an 8 comes back 25.4% of the time. A high rating is returned somewhat more often than chance, but two times out of three it is not.

What this means if you want matches

A match takes two separate things: the other person has to see your post, and then they have to like it. The data says the first step loses more people than the second, especially for men. That changes what is worth doing:

• Don't read silence as rejection. For a man, about six out of seven high ratings have simply not been seen yet.
• Keep rating. Rating other people is how you give out 8s, and it also helps your own photos get seen more.
• Put your strongest photo forward. A post is rated as a whole, and one person's best and worst posts differ by 0.58 points on average, which near the 8 line decides a lot.
• Rate honestly. An 8 you don't mean can open a chat you don't want, and ratings far from everyone else's count for less over time.
• If you only want ratings, set "Match me with" to "No one". You keep your scores and statistics and nobody is matched with you.

Method and limits

Numbers are from RATE's database on November 11, 2026. "A rated B" means A gave at least one counted rating to a post of B, and we use the highest score A gave to any of B's posts, because one 8 is enough for a match. A rating is counted only if it counts in the app; test, banned and deleted accounts are left out. There are 8,807 one-way pairs and 651 pairs where both rated each other.

• 36 mutual pairs is a small number. The percentages will move as more pairs form.
• "Not rated back yet" can mean the other person has not been shown the post yet, or has stopped using the app. We can't tell those apart.
• RATE's feed is not random. It decides who sees whom, so these rates describe RATE's feed as much as they describe people.
• We don't publish the "8 came back" rate separately for men and women, because one side of each figure rests on too few people for our publishing rule.