Maybe ten minutes, there are anywhere from 24 to 40 people living in the same housing area as me.
I live alone and I’m retired.
I’m in regular contact with my family but they don’t live locally. So they might be concerned if they didn’t hear from me for a couple of weeks but they wouldn’t drive over to check on me.
I have people I know socially that live in the area. But while they’d notice my absence, I’m not so close that they’d come to my house looking for me.
So the likeliest possibility would be my landlady checking one me when I didn’t drop off my rent check.
Probably within minutes. If I hit the floor somebody would yell, “WTH was that?”
If I died in my sleep, the next morning they’d wonder why no coffee.
That’s pretty much it- I would certainly still be warm, and depending on the cause, maybe even just “mostly dead” as Miracle Max would put it.
Lives alone with no SO. Also, any given week, I may work out of any of four offices, with no one expecting that I be in any particular one at a given time.
Given the above, I’m thinking a week or so.
I’m going to put a carbon monoxide warning sign on my closet door, just in case.
Actually, there is someone who calls me several times a week, and if I didn’t answer repeated calls for 24 hours or so, authorities would be called. But there would certainly be nobody who would notice my absence, other than that.
Ha! My coworkers are nosy as hell and they would start looking by 10 am.
I wouldn’t go more than a few hours, though - I have a partner.
Sadly, this is something I started thinking about because it just happened to someone I know vaguely from church. I heard the Meals on Wheels people found her (I’m sure that was really fun for them). It sounds like they do it on weekdays and she died sometime over the weekend, so it could have been a couple of days.
If it wasn’t those folks, I’m not sure how long it would have taken. I know there are people from church who check up on her, but they might only do it once a month or so, so it could have taken a while. I don’t know what the exact situation was. She was often ill so not showing up at church wouldn’t have worried people, although she always responded to phone calls so it might have triggered a check if someone had tried to call her and she didn’t answer.
How long would I lay dead? No time at all. If I were dead, I wouldn’t need the eggs! Ha!
My coworker used to refer to the amount of time someone would lie dead before being discovered as his or her rot factor. For unmarried people it’s way higher of course. At the time, I’d have put my rot factor at a week or so, but now that I’m married, I think my wife would notice the subtle difference between my staring at my computer and being stone dead in less than a couple of days. Let’s call it three to be safe.
To those of you who live alone, especially those with pets, some advice: Arrange a check-in buddy. It can be daily, weekly, whatever works. And all it needs to be is an “I’m alive” email or text, that if it doesn’t arrive on schedule, the buddy will check on you. I have this arrangement with my mom, not because she worries she’ll be hurt and unable to reach the phone (“I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”) but because she’s afraid she’ll die in her sleep and her dog will die of dehydration/starvation. The one time she forgot, a quick phone call from me proved she was fine, and that the system worked.
To the OP: At most, a weekend. And this would have to be one where my husband is out of town AND I didn’t have anything planned with friends or family - extremely rare. Work would come looking for me on Monday.
I’m a complete hermit and never see anyone. (Boy, that sounds sad.) My brother calls every couple of weeks, but lives three states away. I’m not sure how long he’d go without following up. Someone is due to move into the apartment next door in a few weeks, and there has been a very slow process of trying to get an exterminator to the place. However, my rent is on autopay and my landlady is on another continent last I heard. So weeks to months. God knows what my cat would do in the meantime. She’s very sweet, but…
I missed Kalea’s post. Great idea. Not sure who, though.
Count me in the “less than 24 hours” crowd, probably much less. I’m married, have one child still living at home, work in an office - I’m rarely alone more than a couple of hours.
A matter of hours. I live with my wife, and my mother and hers are within an hour’s drive. If she left me or something my mother would probably come and check on me after a week or two of no contact. I imagine my employer would investigate sooner if I stopped coming to work.
24 hours or 2 minutes using today’s conditions.
I live in a senior mobile home park, am friendly with neighbors but don’t visit back and forth, so without my husband here it could take quite a while. Our son and a friend might come by after a week or so to find out why I am not answering the phone.
We actually had a case like that here a couple of years ago…woman normally had the local pub deliver booze every day, and once a week or so she would walk up to check her mail. Any way she died in her home and after about a week and a half a neighbor called the police saying no one had seen her for a while. They came out and sure enough dead laying on her living room floor. After a few months someone came in cleaned the place, new carpeting etc and sold it. I don’t know if they are required to tell the prospective new owner or not. So I don’t tell the woman who bought it.
I work from home and have a wife and kid. I haven’t been alone in the house for more than 2-3 continuous hours for a number of years.
The smell, or unpaid rent, whichever came first. Work might do some kind of welfare check, but I’m not sure.
I live alone, but work would miss me and it would be very unusual if I hadn’t called in. 2 or 3 people might check on me the same day. So, outside would be a weekend plus a day or two.
A couple of minutes to a few hours, tops. Not enough time for my cat to start eating my body. 
If I was very lucky, I would get .8 seconds of Resting In Peace before my three-year-old began to climb on me, demanding snacks.