How long do house spiders live?
By The Pest GuyLast updated
Longer than most people expect, and the two sexes are completely different. Female house spiders commonly live for two to three years, staying in one place. Males live a single season as adults: they mature in their second year, go looking for females, and die not long after mating.
That difference is the answer to the question people are usually really asking, which is why the house suddenly fills with spiders in September. It does not. Sightings peak in autumn because the males of many species reach adulthood then and start wandering about looking for a mate. The spiders were already living with you, quietly, for months.
So the large spider crossing the living-room carpet in October is not an arrival. It is a resident male, at the end of a life that has mostly been spent motionless in a dark corner, and he has a few weeks left whatever you do about him.
The female you never see is the one that has been there for years. She sits in a funnel web in a cupboard, behind a bookcase or under the stairs, and she does not travel. House spiders can also go for long stretches without food or water, which is part of why an undisturbed corner suits them so well.
None of this is a reason to worry about them. There are around 650 spider species in the UK, twelve have been known to bite people, and none living here is deadly. If you would rather not share the room, a glass and a piece of card puts one outside in ten seconds, and reducing the insects it is hunting does more than anything you could spray.