Millennial Age Range

What years are Millennials?

The most widely cited definition comes from Pew Research Center, which uses birth years 1981 through 1996. That is a 16-year span, the same length Pew uses for Generation X (1965–1980). Millennials are also called Generation Y; the two names describe the same cohort.

The age range above updates automatically from today's date. Because people born in the same year have birthdays at different times, the range shows the youngest and oldest ages someone in the group could be today.

Why 1981 and 1996?

Generation boundaries are not official. Apart from the Baby Boomers, no U.S. government agency formally defines them. Pew chose its Millennial range in 2018 and explained the end year in 2019. Its reasoning centers on shared experiences during formative years:

• September 11, 2001. Most Millennials were between 5 and 20 years old, old enough to remember the attacks and their aftermath. Most of Gen Z has little or no memory of them.
• The Great Recession. Many Millennials finished school and entered the workforce around the 2007–2009 recession, which Pew links to a slower start into adult milestones.
• Technology. Millennials grew up during the rise of the internet. When the iPhone launched in 2007, the oldest members of Gen Z were about 10, so constant mobile connectivity was a given for them in a way it was not for most Millennials.

Pew itself calls generational cutoffs "not an exact science" and notes that people born near a boundary may feel closer to the neighboring generation.

Other definitions you may see

Because there is no single official range, different researchers draw the lines in different places:

• 1981–1996: Pew Research Center, the definition used on this site and by most major news outlets.
• 1982–2000: used by the U.S. Census Bureau in a 2015 population release, which put the Millennial population at 83.1 million under that wider range.
• Starting around 1980: some researchers start the cohort a year earlier and end it in the mid-1990s.

The term "Millennials" is generally credited to authors William Strauss and Neil Howe in the late 1980s. "Generation Y" first appeared in an Advertising Age editorial in 1993, as the generation that followed Generation X.

How many Millennials are there?

Using Census Bureau estimates, Pew calculated that there were about 72.1 million Millennials in the United States in 2019, slightly more than the 71.6 million Baby Boomers. That made Millennials the largest living adult generation in the country. Immigration keeps the group growing, and Pew projected it would peak at about 74.9 million in 2033.

Cusp years: Xennials and Zillennials

People born at either edge of the range often relate to both neighboring generations, and informal "microgeneration" labels have grown up around them:

• Xennials are people born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, between Gen X and Millennials. They are often described as having an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.
• Zillennials are people born in the mid-to-late 1990s, between Millennials and Gen Z. They are sometimes called second-wave Millennials.

These labels have no agreed-upon birth years. They are useful mainly as a reminder that generations blend into each other.

Millennial FAQ