The proportion of people who drink alcohol weekly or more often has decreased.
Regular alcohol consumption among Finns has decreased as we enter the 2020s. The proportion of people who drink alcohol weekly or more often has decreased from 52% to 48% among men and from 29% to 22% among women between 2016 and 2023.
That’s according to the THL Drinking Patterns Survey, which has been conducted regularly every eight years since 1968.
In 2023, 6% of men and 2% of women drank alcohol at least four times a week, with men aged 55–69 being the most frequent drinkers. Of these, 62% drank at least once a week and 11% drank four or more times a week.
The proportion of drinkers in the population remained at the same level between 2016 and 2023, at around 10% for men and 14% for women.
“The proportion of drinkers has been declining for a long time, but it stopped declining in the early 2000s when slightly less than one in ten respondents were sober,” Janne Härkönen, a special researcher at THL, said in a statement. “Since then, sobriety has become slightly more common, especially among women and people under 55. The prevalence of sobriety increased more before 2016 than after.”
Despite the overall decline in alcohol consumption, regular binge drinking was nearly as common at the population level in 2023 as it was in 2016. In 2023, 21 percent of respondents drank six or more drinks on one or more occasions per month, down from 22 percent in 2016.
“While consumption of more than six drinks continued to decline among 20–34-year-olds, it may have even increased among middle-aged men,” Pia Mäkelä, a research professor at THL, said in the statement.
According to THL, traditionally, binge drinking has been most common among 20–34-year-olds, but the differences between age groups in drinking more than six drinks at a time have almost disappeared for men and narrowed for women.
“Heavy drinking,” defined by THL as 13 or more drinks in one session, has also declined across age groups but was still most common among 20–34-year-olds in 2023. 41% of men in this age group had drunk 13 or more drinks in one sitting on at least one day in the previous year.
“Young people don’t necessarily think about the harms of drinking,” Mäkelä said.
