Published Aug 11, 2026, 3:00 AM EDT
A new study finds veteran drinking is declining overall, but heavy drinking is rising among veterans ages 35 to 49.
According to a recent study, most American veterans over the past decade have been drinking less. A small and welcome piece of good news buried in the sometimes anxiety-inducing health data. Binge-drinking is down, with younger veterans in particular pulling away from the bottle. Even the gap between how much men and women drink has been shrinking. Then there is the exception. Veterans between the ages of 35 and 49 who are supposed to be past their rowdiest years and settled into careers and families are the one group whose heavy drinking is climbing. While everyone around them drinks less, they are trending toward drinking more. A new study suggests the reason has less to do with alcohol than with the root causes that often lead to drinking.
What’s In the Study
The findings come from a peer-reviewed study published this year in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports. It examined nationally representative federal survey data on veterans from 2016 through 2024. Researchers drew on the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the large annual health survey run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They then tracked how patterns of drinking shifted over those nine years. Binge drinking stats were very optimistic. They defined this statistic as consuming enough in a single sitting to push blood alcohol to risky levels, and it declined among veterans overall. The steepest drops were found among those aged 18 to 34 and among men. Stats on heavy drinking are where the story starts to diverge. Defined as sustained excessive consumption over time rather than in one sitting, it held steady across the whole veteran population. However, among veterans aged 35 to 49, it rose significantly. Female veterans, meanwhile, saw their heavy drinking decline, narrowing a longstanding gap between the two sexes. In other words, the overall improvement masked a specific segment of veterans moving in the wrong direction in regard to alcohol consumption.
