Marriage Statistics (2026)

The U.S. recorded 2,041,926 marriages in 2023, a crude marriage rate of 6.1 per 1,000 people.

This figure comes from the federal government's official vital-statistics tracking system, which compiles marriage license data reported by 45 states and Washington, D.C. (five states do not report marriage data to the national system).

The share of U.S. adults who are currently married rose slightly, from 50% to 51%, between 2019 and 2023 — but remains down from 58% in 1995.

The recent small uptick doesn't reverse the longer decline; researchers note it may partly reflect pandemic-era relationship stabilization patterns rather than a structural shift back toward higher marriage rates.

The median age at first marriage in 2023 was 30.2 for men and 28.4 for women — up from 27.4 and 25.3 just two decades earlier, in 2004.

That's roughly a 3-year increase in under 20 years, part of a much longer trend: in 1956, the median first-marriage age hit an all-time low of 22.5 for men and 20.1 for women.

The gender gap in first-marriage age has held at about 2 years consistently since 2008.

While both men's and women's marriage ages have risen together, the roughly 2-year gap between them has remained structurally stable even as the absolute ages climbed — suggesting the delay in marriage is driven by shared generational factors (education, career timelines, cost of living) rather than a gender-specific shift.

25% of 40-year-olds in the U.S. had never married as of 2021, compared to just 6% in 1980 — a four-fold increase.

This is a different measure than median age at first marriage: it captures people who may never marry at all, not just those marrying later. The four-fold jump over roughly 40 years is one of the largest shifts in any statistic on this page.

Only 67% of 12th graders say they'll likely choose to marry someday, down from 80% in 1993.

This drop of 13 percentage points among high school seniors over roughly three decades tracks closely with the rising share of 40-year-olds who have never married — suggesting today's declining marriage intentions among teens are consistent with, not contradicted by, actual adult marriage behavior.

36% of ever-married U.S. adults describe their marriage as 'very happy' — a figure that has held roughly steady in the survey tracking it since 1972.

Unlike marriage rate or age at marriage, self-reported marital happiness among people who are married has not shown the same long-term decline, suggesting that fewer people marrying (and marrying later) hasn't been accompanied by declining satisfaction among those who do marry.

Even as spouses increasingly earn similar incomes, wives still do more housework and caregiving, while husbands do more paid work and leisure.

This nationally representative survey of 5,152 U.S. adults directly tested whether closing the earnings gap between spouses also closes the household-labor gap — and found that it hasn't, which researchers connect to lower reported satisfaction with the division of labor among higher-earning wives specifically.

Europe's crude marriage rate fell from about 8 per 1,000 people to 4.0 per 1,000 between roughly 2000 and 2023 — roughly twice the pace of the U.S. decline over a comparable window.

This suggests the forces driving down marriage rates (rising cohabitation, delayed marriage, declining birth rates) are shared across wealthy countries, but the U.S. marriage rate has fallen more gradually than the broader European average over the same period.