The article investigates the development of loneliness before and in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic against the background of the socio-economic situation of older people. For this purpose, variance analyses are carried out with data from Lower Austria utilizing two surveys (pre-pandemic, peri-pandemic). The analyses show that older people are not a homogeneous group, i.e. the level of loneliness was already divergent before the pandemic and these existing differences were largely maintained at a somewhat higher level during the pandemic with little variation.