Soap Opera TV Ratings: SOM Soap Ratings Index
Soap opera TV ratings in one number: the size of the daytime soap audience, tracked week by week since 2017 from Nielsen ratings. Each show is drawn on the same scale, so the lines can be compared directly.
Soap opera TV ratings this week
Latest Nielsen week: Oct 5-9, 2026 (Live+Same Day total viewers). The SOM Soap Ratings Index stands at 103.5, up 4.3% from the same week a year ago. The Young and the Restless remains the most-watched soap on TV.
| Soap | Network | Viewers | vs prior week | vs same week 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Young and the Restless | CBS | 3,015,000 | -86,000 | +173,000 |
| The Bold and the Beautiful | CBS | 2,628,000 | -125,000 | +36,000 |
| General Hospital | ABC | 1,898,000 | +6,000 | +20,000 |
| Beyond the Gates | CBS | 1,756,000 | -9,000 | +161,000 |
How the index works
The index adds up the weekly Nielsen audience of every daytime soap that has broadcast ratings and sets the first four weeks of the 2025-26 season (Sept 22 to Oct 17, 2025) at 100. A reading of 105 means the combined audience is 5% larger than in that base period.
When a show joins or leaves, the index is chain-linked the way stock indexes are: the new lineup is matched to the old one at the changeover, so Days of our Lives’ move to Peacock and the arrival of Beyond the Gates don’t make the line jump.
What’s in it
The Young and the Restless, The Bold and the Beautiful and Beyond the Gates (CBS), General Hospital (ABC), and Days of our Lives (NBC) until it moved to Peacock in Sept 2022. Peacock does not release weekly Nielsen numbers, so Days stops there.
Shaded stretches mark the 2020 production shutdown, when the soaps aired reruns, and two periods when no weekly total-viewer numbers were published. Nielsen also changed its method in Sept 2025 (adding Big Data to its panel), so weeks before and after that line are close but not identical in method.
Soap opera TV ratings: common questions
Which soap opera has the highest TV ratings?
The Young and the Restless. It has been the most-watched daytime soap for more than 35 years and drew about 3.0 million viewers a day in the week of Oct 5-9, 2026, ahead of The Bold and the Beautiful (about 2.6 million).
How many people watch General Hospital?
About 1.9 million viewers a day on ABC in the latest Nielsen week (Oct 5-9, 2026), not counting streaming on Hulu.
How many people watch Beyond the Gates?
About 1.76 million viewers a day on CBS in the week of Oct 5-9, 2026, up about 161,000 from the same week of its first season.
Where do soap opera TV ratings come from?
Nielsen measures them. The weekly numbers here are Live+Same Day total viewers, which Nielsen releases to the networks and which are published two to five weeks later. Soap Opera Magazine turns them into the SOM Soap Ratings Index each week.
Why are there no Days of our Lives ratings?
Days of our Lives moved from NBC to Peacock in Sept 2022, and Peacock does not release weekly Nielsen numbers, so its line in the index stops there.
See every week’s numbers
Source: Nielsen, Live+Same Day (Big Data + Panel from Sept 2025), as published in Soap Opera Network’s weekly ratings reports. A few missing weeks are filled from the week-to-week and year-to-year changes those reports list. Index calculations by Soap Opera Magazine.
Author
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