Divorce Statistics (2026)

The U.S. recorded 672,502 divorces in 2023, a crude divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 people.

This is the same national vital-statistics system used to track marriages, compiled from 45 states and Washington, D.C. The crude rate is useful for year-over-year tracking but can be misleading across countries or eras where the share of the population that's married differs.

The refined divorce rate — divorces per 1,000 married women — fell from a peak of 22.6 in 1980 to 14.4 in 2023, a 36% decline.

The refined rate is considered the more accurate long-term measure because it adjusts for the size of the married population, rather than the whole adult population. By this measure, divorce has been getting steadily less common for over 40 years, not more.

One factor behind the long decline: the married population has shifted toward adults with higher levels of education, and less-educated adults now marry less often in the first place.

Because higher education is associated with lower divorce risk (see the education section below), a married population that skews more educated over time will show a falling aggregate divorce rate even if the risk for any specific education group didn't change — though in this case, the risk actually diverged further by education too.

The 5-year marital dissolution gap between college graduates and the least-educated more than doubled, from 11.5 percentage points (2000-2004) to 23.5 points (2010-2014).

This comes from a National Survey of Family Growth analysis of 6,356 women and 1,536 recorded marital dissolutions. Dissolution risk for women with a college degree fell from 10.5% to 5.9% over the period studied, while risk for women with less than a high school education rose from 22.0% to 29.4% — moving in opposite directions.

Less-educated couples are more likely to informally separate rather than formally divorce, which means official divorce statistics likely understate the true gap in relationship instability by education.

The same study found the formal divorce-only gap between education groups (11 points by 2010-2014) was about half the size of the total marital-dissolution gap (23 points), because lower-education couples more often separate without a legal divorce — a pattern that doesn't show up in CDC divorce counts at all.

In 2023, 16% of divorces occurred within the first 5 years of marriage, 24% between 5 and 9 years, and 22% after 25 or more years.

That last figure is the one people tend to find most surprising: nearly a quarter of divorces in 2023 involved marriages that had already lasted a quarter-century or more, underscoring that long marriage duration alone isn't a guarantee against divorce.

'Gray divorce' — divorce among adults 50 and older — rose sharply from 3.9 per 1,000 married women in 1990 to 11.0 in 2008, before stabilizing near 10.3 in 2023.

Gray divorce is the one major exception to the decades-long decline in U.S. divorce rates: even as divorce has fallen overall, it has risen and then held at a much higher level among older adults than it was a generation ago.

41% of Black Americans who ever married reported a divorce, compared to 16% of Asian Americans — the widest gap in Pew's demographic analysis.

The same analysis found a nativity gap too: 36% of U.S.-born ever-married adults reported a divorce, versus 22% of foreign-born ever-married adults — both patterns that researchers link to differences in average age at marriage, economic circumstances, and social/family support structures across groups.

About two-thirds of divorced Americans go on to remarry — 68% of men and 64% of women.

The gender gap is modest but consistent: men remarry at a slightly higher rate than women after divorce, and remarriage rates for both are highest among those with a bachelor's degree or more.

Among remarried divorced adults, 9% of men and 4% of women live with a stepchild.

This lower-than-expected figure partly reflects that many remarriages happen later in life, after children from a first marriage are already grown and living independently.

There is no single government-tracked dataset on why couples divorce, because most U.S. states use no-fault divorce and don't require a stated cause on the filing.

That's why 'top causes of divorce' statistics you'll see cited (money, infidelity, lack of commitment, incompatibility) all come from private surveys of varying quality and sample size, rather than a single authoritative source — treat any single 'X% of divorces are caused by Y' figure with more skepticism than the rate statistics on this page.