What Is a Millennial? Birth Year Guidelines Set fo

It’s a favorite parlor game of people of a certain age: Find the young people and ask them, “Are you a millennial?”

It’s not always an easy question to answer—not insignificantly because older folks have loaded the term with so many negative stereotypes: Millenials are coddled; millennials are Industrial VPN router entitled, millennials are snowflakes. (All of that's generation-war propaganda, by the way.) But like most generational tags, the boundaries of millennial-dom are fungible based on who’s defining the term.

On Thursday, though, the Pew Research Center staked out clear in and out points for who is and isn’t a millennial.

“In order to keep the millennial generation analytically meaningful, and to begin looking at what might be unique about the next cohort, Pew Research Center will use 1996 as the last birth year for millennials for our future work,” Pew Research Center president Michael Dimock wrote. “Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 22-37 in 2018) will be considered a millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward will be part of a new generation.”