Which dating apps actually reverse bans

Seven dating apps publish a number for how often they overturn their own bans. All seven publish it because a European law made them, all seven describe European cases, and between them the reversal rate runs from 6.4 per cent to about 40 per cent. That is an enormous spread for what is nominally the same job.

That spread is the honest headline. It means the app you were banned on genuinely matters, and it also means none of these figures predicts one person’s case, because reading a 36 per cent as your 36 per cent is the single biggest mistake available here. Everything below is quoted from the platforms’ own filings and help pages. Where a company publishes nothing, we say so rather than filling the gap.

The league table, from their own filings

Ranked by the share each company says it reversed. Read the period column: these are not all the same twelve months, and one is not even the same year.

Two rows need a second look before anyone quotes them. Plenty of Fish tops the table on 299 complaints, small enough that a few dozen decisions either way would move it a long way, and its own filing puts the median at 5 days for closed accounts and 4 days across all categories. That is slow in a table where Bumble answers in about an hour.

Grindr’s row needs the most care. Its 2025 report records 64,331 appeals still open on 31 December 2025, with, in its own words, “active discussions ongoing between Grindr and the relevant users.” The roughly 23 per cent is a share of decided appeals only, and a company holding that many cases open at year end can move its own headline rate by deciding them in a different order.

What these numbers are not

Every figure in that table is real, published and quotable. None is what a stressed person reading at midnight wants it to be. Four caveats, and they are not decoration.

• Badoo’s 7.4 per cent is a floor, not a ban-reversal rate. Badoo’s own footnote defeats the naive reading: the 127,648 pool mixes blocked members appealing their block with people appealing a report of theirs that was rejected. Two populations, one denominator. Read it as a lower bound, not as one blocked member’s odds.
• Grindr’s figure covers decided appeals only. With 64,331 open at year end, the denominator is a moving object.
• Every number here is European. These are Digital Services Act filings, describing EU users, decided under EU obligations, in a year when EU regulators were watching. Nothing in them tells you how the same company treats a case from Texas, Manchester or Dubai, and none of these companies publishes a comparable figure for the rest of the world.
• A rate is a history, not a forecast. Hinge reversed 36.07 per cent of 86,650 complaints. That does not mean your appeal has a 36.07 per cent chance. Your case has facts, a category, evidence or none, and a process that already decided against you once. The table tells you which doors have historically opened. It cannot tell you about yours.

One quieter point. These are rates for the platform’s internal appeal, not a measure of how many bans were wrong. They count bans that were both appealed and then overturned, which is a much smaller and much stranger quantity.

The apps that publish nothing, which is most of them

Seven publish. Far more do not, and nothing compels them to: publishing a reversal rate is a Digital Services Act obligation, so it attaches to companies operating at scale in the EU and to nobody else. The apps in the table are not the honest ones and the apps missing from it are not the dishonest ones. They are the regulated and the unregulated.

• Nothing usable at all. Boo, Breeze, EliteSingles, Facebook Dating, Raya and Zoosk publish no appeal or reversal figures for the dating product. Zoosk goes further: its governing documents contain no Digital Services Act content of any kind, no internal complaint mechanism and no out-of-court body. Raya publishes none either.
• A denial in place of a number. BLK states only that its EU users sit well below the 45 million very-large-platform threshold. Feeld said its first transparency report was coming in late 2024 and, on a page edited in May 2026, still says it expects to publish one. Coffee Meets Bagel publishes no DSA report at all.
• Numbers, but not these numbers. eharmony publishes an Australia-only quarter, April to June 2025: 8,816 accounts terminated, 8,806 of them spam or scam, with a 1.47 per cent automated error rate. That is its nearest thing to a reversal figure, because eharmony defines accuracy as the reversal rate following user appeals. It is not an appeal grant rate. happn publishes enforcement volumes rather than appeal outcomes, and Muzz describes no internal complaint mechanism at all.
• Nothing separate for the sibling brands. Match.com and OkCupid publish no per-brand reversal figure we could verify, despite running the same shared Match Group appeal desk as Plenty of Fish.

Do not read that silence as bad news about your odds, and do not read it as good news either. It is an absence of accountability, not a data point. If your app is not in the table, nobody can quote you a rate for it, including us. What you can still learn is what the app writes down about its own process, which is what the per-app pages are for.

The precision numbers, and why they help you

There is a second published figure almost nobody notices, and for a wrongly banned person it is more useful than the reversal rate. Tinder and Hinge both report the “precision” of their automated moderation. Tinder’s is 0.188 per cent, Hinge’s 0.48 per cent.

Those look catastrophic until you read the definition both publish in the same file. Precision here is “the number of remediations (bans, suspensions, or content removals) where the bad actor submitted an appeal and the appeal was accepted, divided by the total number of remediations applied.” The numerator is successful appeals; the denominator is every enforcement action taken, challenged or not.

That is the whole argument, and it is worth saying slowly. The only mechanism by which a wrong ban registers as wrong, anywhere in these companies’ published numbers, is an appeal someone files and wins. Silence is scored as agreement. A person banned unfairly who walks away has, in the platform’s own accounting, confirmed the platform was right.

Two smaller observations. Note whose word sits in the definition: “the bad actor submitted an appeal.” The metric built to measure whether the company was wrong calls the person who proved it wrong the bad actor. And Hinge publishes no accuracy or recall figure at all, so its one published measure of its own correctness only moves when a banned user pushes it.

Set that against what the same companies say about their automated systems. Bumble reports 99.25 per cent accuracy, a 0.75 per cent error rate, and grants 21.6 per cent of appeals. Badoo reports 99.60 per cent accuracy and a 0.40 per cent error rate. Those pairs cannot both describe the same decisions, and the gap between them is the space a good appeal works in. The mechanics are in how to write a ban appeal that actually gets read.

The second act: what happens after a refusal

The same filings carry a second table nobody reads: what happened when a user took the refusal to an independent body under Article 21 of the Digital Services Act. The volumes are microscopic and the outcomes are not.

Look at the Plenty of Fish row again. In a year when it handled 299 internal complaints about closed accounts, exactly one person took a refusal to an independent body. Nothing was upheld, one decision was reversed, and Plenty of Fish implemented it. The route is almost entirely unused, and the one person who used it won.

The Hinge and Tinder rows are more sobering, and both halves matter. Hinge reports a median of 1,209.25 on the same scale as its internal appeals, where the in-app figure is 19. Neither company labels the unit on that field, so take the ratio rather than a number of days: roughly sixty times longer than the appeal inside the app. Tinder’s is 1,260.87 against 20. Then, having taken that long, Hinge implemented 72.05 per cent of outcomes and Tinder about 62 per cent. Both file more than half of these disputes under “decision omitted,” a template category neither explains.

Which referee covers which app

A handful of bodies are certified under Article 21 across the EU. Almost none will look at a dating app, and the ones that will do not agree about which apps they take.

Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid are the only dating apps named in the European Commission’s official register of certified bodies, listed under Germany’s Platform Control. Italy’s ADR Center separately accepts Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, Badoo and OkCupid through its own intake form, and runs landing pages for banned Hinge and Tinder accounts. Greece’s ADR Point accepts Bumble, Hinge and Tinder the same way. No other certified body covers any dating app: Appeals Centre Europe, the best known, takes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Threads, YouTube and Google Maps, and nothing in dating.

• An intake dropdown is not a promise from the platform. ADR Center listing Tinder is ADR Center’s decision, not Tinder’s. Match Group’s own Digital Services Act page acknowledges Article 21, names no certified body, points users at the Commission list and commits to nothing.
• None of these bodies’ binding rules name any app. Platform Control’s rules of procedure name no platform at all; the Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid list lives only in the Commission register and the German regulator’s press release. ADR Center and ADR Point have the mirror-image gap: dating apps on the intake form, no platform in the rules.
• Grindr has no named referee anywhere, and its own published position is that no bodies have been certified yet, on a page it has not substantively edited since 30 August 2024. Bodies have been certified since: Appeals Centre Europe in September 2024, Platform Control in November 2025.

The practicalities differ too. Platform Control does not require the internal appeal first and gives you a year from the decision. ADR Center requires it and gives twelve months. ADR Point requires it and states no deadline at all. All are free to the user. Mechanics in the Article 21 guide.

What to actually do with all this

A league table is only worth reading if it changes what you do next.

1. File, whatever the rate says. On the two companies that publish a precision figure, a ban that goes unappealed is scored as a correct ban. Even Hily’s 6.4 per cent is thirteen people who got their accounts back, and every one of them filed something.
2. File once, and file it well. Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, The League and BLK publish the same rule in near-identical words: multiple appeal submissions will not be considered and may alter your position in the queue. Tinder’s version is blunter still: an action you have already appealed cannot be appealed again through the appeals centre. Hinge warns that reaching out further after submitting can alter your position in the queue. Badoo and HER cap nothing, but both treat a manifestly unfounded or abusive report or appeal as a violation in its own right. Volume is a hazard, not a tactic.
3. Date the decision today. Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Bumble, Badoo, BLK and happn all publish a six-month window running from the action, not from the day you noticed. Hinge, Grindr, HER and Muzz publish no deadline at all, which argues for speed. The deadline calculator works out yours.
4. Screenshot before you write. Evidence expires faster than the window. Plenty of Fish removes conversations older than 30 days as housekeeping, Coffee Meets Bagel deletes twelve months after a ban, and Feeld a year after a ban for anyone banned on or after 13 October 2025.
5. Do not charge back, and do not delete. Plenty of Fish’s terms let it terminate your account immediately if you reverse a payment, and Boo reserves deactivation for that one trigger, so a chargeback can convert an appealable ban into a contractually justified closure. Bumble treats chargeback abuse as a verification trigger. Deletion does not lift a ban and destroys your evidence: Hily says outright that an erasure request will not release you from the prohibition on using Hily. See the deletion guide and the erasure guide.
6. If you are in the EU and the appeal fails, the second act exists. It is slow, it is non-binding, and on Plenty of Fish’s numbers almost nobody uses it. That is not the same as nobody winning it.

Questions people actually ask

Which dating app reverses the most bans?

Of the seven that publish anything, Plenty of Fish reports the highest share at about 40 per cent, on a very small base of 299 complaints about closed accounts. Hinge is the highest on any meaningful volume: 31,251 reversals out of 86,650 complaints in 2025, or 36.07 per cent. Both are EU figures from the companies’ own Digital Services Act filings.

Does a high reversal rate mean my appeal will succeed?

No. A reversal rate is a record of how a company decided thousands of other people’s cases in Europe last year. It does not carry over to your facts, your evidence, or the category your ban was filed under. Treat the table as a map of which doors have opened, never as a probability attached to you.

Why is Badoo’s 7.4 per cent not a ban-reversal rate?

Because of Badoo’s own footnote. The 127,648 appeals in that denominator mix blocked members appealing their block with people appealing a report of theirs that Badoo rejected. Those are two different populations sharing one number, so 7.4 per cent is a floor rather than one blocked member’s odds.

What does Tinder’s 0.188 per cent precision figure mean?

It is the share of all Tinder enforcement actions that were both appealed and overturned. Tinder defines it as successful appeals divided by total remediations applied. It is not the share of appeals that succeed, which the same filing records as 14,478 out of 66,877, about 21.6 per cent, and it is not proof that 99.8 per cent of bans were right, because every ban nobody appealed counts towards the correct side by default. Hinge publishes the same measure at 0.48 per cent.

Do these numbers apply outside the EU?

Not directly. Every figure on this page comes from an EU transparency filing describing EU cases, produced because the Digital Services Act requires it. None of these companies publishes a comparable reversal rate for the US, the UK or anywhere else, so nobody can tell you what the same appeal does from outside Europe.

Which dating apps publish no reversal rate at all?

Most of them. Boo, Breeze, EliteSingles, Facebook Dating, Raya, Zoosk, Muzz, Coffee Meets Bagel and BLK publish nothing usable on appeal outcomes. Feeld promised a transparency report for late 2024 and, on a page edited in May 2026, still says it expects to publish one. Match.com and OkCupid publish no separate figure of their own.

Does an app publishing nothing mean it never reverses bans?

No, and this is the reading to avoid. Publishing is a Digital Services Act obligation that attaches to companies operating at scale in the EU. An app with no published figure is unmeasured, not proven harsh. It is also unaccountable, which cuts the other way.

Is the out-of-court route better than the in-app appeal?

It is slower and it is not binding. Hinge reports a median of 1,209.25 on the same unlabelled scale where its internal appeals take 19, roughly sixty times longer, and it then implemented 72.05 per cent of the outcomes. Tinder implemented about 62 per cent. It is a route for after a refusal, not instead of the appeal.

Which certified bodies take dating-app cases?

Germany’s Platform Control is the only one that names dating apps in the European Commission’s official register: Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid. Italy’s ADR Center takes Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, Badoo and OkCupid through its own intake form, and Greece’s ADR Point takes Bumble, Hinge and Tinder. No certified body covers Grindr. Appeals Centre Europe takes no dating app at all.

Can a dispute body order my account back?

No. Article 21(2) of the Digital Services Act says a certified body has no power to impose a binding settlement, and Match Group’s own Digital Services Act page says the same. A body being willing to hear your case is also not the platform agreeing to turn up.

How long do I have to appeal?

Where a deadline is published it is almost always six months from the action, not from when you noticed: Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Bumble, Badoo, BLK and happn all publish that window. Hinge, Grindr, HER and Muzz publish no deadline at all, and Hily publishes six months for EU and UK users. No published deadline is a reason to move sooner, not later.

Should I appeal more than once to improve my odds?

No, and on several apps it actively hurts. Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, Match.com, The League and BLK all state that multiple appeal submissions will not be considered and may alter your position in the queue, and Hinge warns that reaching out further after submitting can alter your position too. On Tinder, an action you have already appealed cannot be appealed again through the appeals centre at all. Badoo and HER publish no cap, but both treat a manifestly unfounded or abusive report or appeal as a violation in its own right.