When listening to speech in noise, lip-reading facilitates communication. We investigated to what extent older and younger adults are aware of this benefit, and whether this metacognitive ability changes with age. Participants (N=40) completed a hearing-in-noise task while facing a human-like avatar in virtual reality. A panel of changing transparency was interposed between the listener and the avatar, to create pairs of conditions with different lip-reading accessibility in each trial. We measured performance, confidence and effort during audio-visual listening, and derived measures of real improvement (i.e., lip-reading gain) as well as metacognitive improvement (i.e., perceived gain in accuracy, confidence and effort) on a trial-by-trial basis. Results show that real improvements were comparable in the two age groups, who were also similarly aware of performance and confidence gains resulting from audio-visual lip-reading. Yet, older adults were less able to appreciate the listening effort reduction associated with higher lip visibility, particularly those with lower unisensory lip-reading abilities (as measured in a visual-only condition). Thus, while comparable awareness of audio-visual lip-reading gains exists in older and younger adults, the less efficient unisensory lip-reading skills of older adults may affect their appreciation of this effective speech processing behavior while listening in face-to-face communications. Since perceived effort concurs in the decision to implement (or not) adaptive behaviors, these findings have significance for the design of interventions aimed at ameliorating older adult’s quality of face-to-face interactions.