Divorce Rate in America (2026): What the Data Says

If this is your marriage, read what happens when divorce keeps coming up, or book a first session. It is free.

You have probably heard that half of all marriages end in divorce. That number is old, and it was never a count. It was a projection made decades ago. This page goes through what current data says, uses government and university sources, and points out where the numbers are shaky. I checked the figures against those sources in September 2026.

Statistics describe groups. They can't tell you what will happen in your marriage. They are still useful for dropping myths and for seeing which risk factors matter.

On this page

What percentage of marriages end in divorce?
U.S. divorce rate by year
Second marriage divorce rate
Who files for divorce, men or women?
How education affects divorce risk
How age at marriage affects divorce risk
Gray divorce is the one rate that rose
Does living together before marriage prevent divorce?
Divorce rates vary by place and season
How well does couples therapy work?
Where do divorce statistics come from?
What these statistics mean for your marriage
Frequently asked questions about divorce statistics

What percentage of marriages end in divorce?

About 40% of first marriages that are starting now are expected to end in divorce. That is the Institute for Family Studies' 2025 estimate. For couples who married in the 2000s, the same group puts the figure at about 44%.

The 50% claim comes from projections made in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when divorce was rising fast after no-fault laws spread. The projections assumed the climb would continue. It didn't. The divorce rate peaked around 1980 and has fallen since.

Older generations did divorce more often. The Bureau of Labor Statistics followed people born between 1957 and 1964 through age 55. It found that 46% of their first marriages ended in divorce (49.2% for women, 42.7% for men). So "about half" was close to true for that generation. It doesn't describe couples who marry today.

Your own odds depend on things that vary a lot from couple to couple. The biggest ones are below.

U.S. divorce rate by year

There are two standard measures. The crude rate is divorces per 1,000 people in the whole population. The refined rate is divorces per 1,000 married women, which is more useful because it leaves out everyone who isn't married.

Crude divorce rate, from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics:

Year	Divorces per 1,000 people
2000	4.0
2005	3.6
2010	3.6
2015	3.1
2019	2.7
2020	2.3
2021	2.5
2022	2.4
2023	2.4

The crude rate was a little over 5 per 1,000 in the early 1980s. The CDC's counts leave out states that don't report, and which states are missing changes slightly from year to year, so don't read much into a difference of 0.1.

Refined divorce rate, from the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University:

Year	Divorces per 1,000 married women
1900	4.1
1980 (peak)	22.6
2020	14.0
2021	14.0
2022	14.6
2023	14.4
2024	14.2

The refined rate is down about 37% from its 1980 peak. The two tables come from different data sources, so compare numbers within a table, not between them.

Philip Cohen at the University of Maryland found that the divorce rate fell about 18% between 2008 and 2016 and linked the decline to changes in who marries and when.

The pandemic caused a one-year dip. The CDC counted 746,971 divorces in 2019 and 630,505 in 2020, a drop of 16%. Court closures probably explain much of that. The rate rose slightly in 2021.

Second marriage divorce rate

This is where the data gets messy.

Marriage	Share ending in divorce	Source and group
First marriage	About 40%	Institute for Family Studies estimate for marriages starting now
First marriage	46%	Bureau of Labor Statistics, people born 1957 to 1964, by age 55
Second marriage	39.1%	Bureau of Labor Statistics, same group, by age 55

You will often see 60% to 67% for second marriages and 73% for third marriages. Those figures are repeated everywhere, including on well-known therapy sites. I can't trace them to a current primary source. The Bureau of Labor Statistics study (2024) is the most rigorous recent data I know of, and it found 39.1% for second marriages.

Don't conclude that second marriages are safer. Second marriages start later, so they have had less time to end by age 55, and the people who remarry are a selected group. What I can say is that the higher figures aren't well supported.

What I see in my office is that people often leave a first marriage believing the problem was their partner. They carry the same patterns into the next one. Doing the internal work matters more than finding a better match. That is why I use differentiation-based therapy.

Who files for divorce, men or women?

Women file most of the time. Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford used a national survey (How Couples Meet and Stay Together, 2009 to 2015, 2,262 adults) and found that women initiated 69% of divorces. Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen studied more than 46,000 divorce decrees from four states. They found that mothers filed two-thirds or more of the divorces involving children.

Rosenfeld also checked whether women simply leave relationships more readily. They don't. Among unmarried couples, men and women were about equally likely to be the one who wanted the breakup. The gap shows up in marriage.

Why do wives file more often?

Nobody knows for certain. These are the explanations with research behind them:

Marital satisfaction. Rosenfeld found that married women rated their relationships lower than married men did. Unmarried women and men rated theirs the same. He suggests marriage carries old expectations about gender roles, such as housework, childcare, and changing a name.

Housework. Time-use research finds that women do more housework and childcare even when both partners work full time (Bianchi, Robinson and Milkie, 2006). Frisco and Williams (2003) linked a wife's sense that the housework was unfair to lower marital happiness and a higher risk of divorce.

Custody. Brinig and Allen found that expecting to get custody was the strongest predictor of who files.

Money. Women can support themselves more easily than they could two generations ago. That makes leaving a real option. This is a common explanation, and it is harder to test than the others.

Menopause. For couples who divorce in midlife, menopause may play a part. Perimenopause can bring poor sleep, mood changes, and lower desire, often in the same years as teenagers, aging parents, and peak work demands. In a 2022 UK survey of more than 1,000 divorced or separating women who had been through perimenopause, 73% said menopause contributed to the breakdown of their marriage. That shows how those women see it, not what caused their divorces, and the survey was not a representative sample. Menopause also can't explain the whole gap, because wives file most divorces involving children too, and those usually happen earlier in life.

In my office, I often see that wives raise concerns earlier and more often. When the concerns go nowhere for years, they decide the marriage can't give them what they need. By the time the couple arrives, the wife has been trying to get her husband's attention for a long time, and he is often shocked that she is thinking of leaving. That is what happens when a couple avoids the hard conversations for years.

How education affects divorce risk

Education is one of the strongest predictors of a marriage lasting. The Bureau of Labor Statistics study found the following for first marriages by age 55:

Education	Men divorced	Women divorced
No high school diploma	About 50% to 53%	About 53% to 56%
Bachelor's degree or higher	27%	40.5%

The National Center for Family and Marriage Research finds the same split in 2022 data. Among ever-married women, 16% of those with a bachelor's degree or higher were currently divorced or separated, compared with 21% to 23% of women with less education. In 1940, about 3% of ever-married women were separated or divorced at every education level.

The diploma itself probably isn't the cause. More education goes along with marrying later, earning more, and having steadier work, and all three lower divorce risk.

How age at marriage affects divorce risk

Nicholas Wolfinger analyzed National Survey of Family Growth data (2006 to 2010) for the Institute for Family Studies. Before age 32, each additional year of age at marriage lowers the odds of divorce by 11%. After 32, the odds rise about 5% per year. Someone who marries at 25 is more than 50% less likely to divorce than someone who marries at 20. Divorce risk is lowest for people who marry around 30.

These are odds, not probabilities. They describe averages across many people.

Gray divorce is the one rate that rose

Divorce among adults 50 and older went the other way. Susan Brown and I-Fen Lin at Bowling Green State University found that the rate roughly doubled between 1990 and 2010, from about 5 to about 10 divorces per 1,000 married people 50 and older.

Pew Research (2025) measured it per 1,000 married women 50 and older. That rate went from 3.9 in 1990 to 11.0 in 2008 and was 10.3 in 2023, so it has leveled off. Pew also found that people 50 and older made up 8.7% of divorces in 1990 and 36% in 2019.

The NCFMR reports that among women 65 and older, the rate went from 1.4 per 1,000 in 1990 to 6.7 in 2023, more than four times higher.

Gray divorce hits women's finances hard. A 2012 Government Accountability Office report found that household income fell 41% for women who divorced after 50, and 23% for men.

Does living together before marriage prevent divorce?

Many people see living together as a test run. The data is more complicated. About 70% of couples now live together before marrying.

Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades surveyed U.S. adults in 2022 for the Institute for Family Studies. Among people who moved in together before they were engaged, 34% of marriages ended. Among people who moved in only after engagement or marriage, 23% ended. That is 48% more likely to end. Couples who had lived with more partners before marriage were also more likely to divorce.

The risk was tied to moving in before engagement. Couples who moved in after they got engaged did about as well as couples who waited until they married.

Stanley calls the pattern "sliding versus deciding." Some couples move in for convenience, then slide into marriage the same way. Others choose each step. The choice matters more than the address.

Divorce rates vary by place and season

By state

The South has the highest refined rates. In the NCFMR's 2024 data, 76% of Southern states were in the top two quartiles. The highest rates were in Oklahoma (20.7 per 1,000 married women), Nevada (19.9), Mississippi (19.2), Wyoming (18.7), and Alabama (18.0). The lowest were in Maine (10.0), Wisconsin (10.8), New Jersey (11.0), Idaho (11.2), and Montana and South Carolina (both 11.7).

By season

Julie Brines and Brian Serafini at the University of Washington studied divorce filings in Washington State from 2001 to 2015. Filings peaked twice a year, in March and August. They argue that winter and summer holidays are seen as the wrong time to file, so filings come after them. This is one state, and the finding was presented at a conference in 2016.

How well does couples therapy work?

Studies of emotionally focused therapy (EFT) report that about 70% of couples move from distress to recovery. Those studies were mostly run by people who developed or trained in the method. Results for other approaches vary.

Timing matters. John Gottman has reported that couples wait about six years, on average, after serious problems start before they get help. Many couples arrive as a last resort, when one partner has already decided to leave. Therapy then often becomes a managed ending, not a repair.

Couples do best when they come in while there is still something to work with, before resentment hardens and one partner has withdrawn for good.

Where do divorce statistics come from?

Three sources do most of the work.

The CDC's National Vital Statistics System collects divorce counts from state records. Five states don't report: California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Mexico. Those five hold about 16% of the U.S. population (California alone holds about 12%), so the national counts are always incomplete. The agency also stopped collecting detailed marriage and divorce data in 1996.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey asks people about marriages and divorces in the past year, and it covers every state. It has done so since 2008. Most current research uses it.

The NCFMR at Bowling Green State University builds on both sources. Its Family Profiles are where the refined divorce rates in this article come from.

Use divorce statistics to see trends and broad patterns. Treat exact figures as estimates. If a number sounds shocking, check where it came from and how old it is.

What these statistics mean for your marriage

Numbers describe groups. They don't decide what happens to one couple.

If you are college educated, married after 25, and in a first marriage, the data says your risk is lower than average. I can't give you a number. If you are in a second marriage and never looked at your own part in the first one, the odds are less encouraging.

The couples who do well are not the ones who started with the best compatibility or the easiest circumstances. They are the ones who decided their own growth mattered more than being comfortable, and who looked at their own part before listing their partner's faults.

If divorce keeps coming up in your fights, read about threats of divorce. If your spouse has already said they want out, read what to do when your wife wants a divorce. I see couples in Roseville and by video anywhere in California.

Frequently asked questions about divorce statistics

What is the current divorce rate in the United States? The crude rate was 2.4 per 1,000 people in 2023. The refined rate was 14.2 per 1,000 married women in 2024. Both are near their lowest levels in about 50 years. About 40% of today's first marriages are expected to end in divorce.

What percentage of second marriages end in divorce? In the best recent data, 39.1% had ended by age 55 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024). Higher figures like 60% to 67% are widely quoted, but I can't find a current source for them.

Do 50% of marriages really end in divorce? No. That number was a projection from the late 1970s. The current estimate for first marriages is about 40%, and lower for college-educated people who marry after their mid-twenties.

Who files for divorce more, husbands or wives? Wives. Rosenfeld's national survey found they initiated 69% of divorces. That gap appears in marriage and not in unmarried relationships.

Does couples therapy work? Many couples improve. EFT studies report about 70% of couples recovering from distress. Couples who start early do better than couples who wait until the marriage is in crisis.

What is gray divorce? Divorce among adults 50 and older. Its rate roughly doubled from 1990 to 2010 and has been flat since about 2008. It accounted for 36% of divorces in 2019 and often leaves women worse off financially.

Does living together before marriage increase divorce risk? Moving in before you are engaged is linked to a 48% higher chance of divorce. Moving in after you are engaged shows no extra risk.

What is the best age to marry to avoid divorce? Divorce risk is lowest for people who marry around age 30. Before 32, each extra year lowers the odds by about 11%. After 32, the odds rise about 5% per year.

James Christensen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in couples therapy at Roseville Couples Counseling in Placer County, California.

Sources

Aughinbaugh, A., & Rothstein, D. S. (2024). Patterns of marriage and divorce from ages 15 to 55: Evidence from the NLSY79. Monthly Labor Review, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2024.
Bianchi, S. M., Robinson, J. P., & Milkie, M. A. (2006). Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. Russell Sage Foundation.
Brines, J., & Serafini, B. (2016). Seasonality of divorce filings in Washington State. Presented at the American Sociological Association annual meeting.
Brinig, M. F., & Allen, D. W. (2000). "These Boots Are Made for Walking": Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women. American Law and Economics Review, 2(1), 126-169.
Brown, S. L., & Lin, I-F. (2012). The Gray Divorce Revolution: Rising Divorce Among Middle-Aged and Older Adults, 1990-2010. The Journals of Gerontology Series B, 67(6), 731-741.
CDC/NCHS. Provisional number of divorces and annulments and divorce rate: United States, 2000-2023. National Vital Statistics System.
Cohen, P. N. (2019). The Coming Divorce Decline. Socius, 5.
Frisco, M. L., & Williams, K. (2003). Perceived Housework Equity, Marital Happiness, and Divorce in Dual-Earner Households. Journal of Family Issues, 24(1).
Institute for Family Studies. (2025). Divorce in Decline: About 40% of Today's Marriages Will End in Divorce.
Loo, J. (2024). Divorce: More than a Century of Change, 1900-2022. NCFMR Family Profile FP-24-11.
NCFMR. (2025). Age Variation in the Refined Divorce Rate, 1990 & 2023. Family Profile FP-25-24.
NCFMR. (2025). Refined Divorce Rate in the U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2024. Family Profile FP-25-31.
Pew Research Center. (2025). 8 facts about divorce, marriage and remarriage in the United States.
Family Law Menopause Project and Newson Health Research and Education (2022). Survey of more than 1,000 women on menopause and divorce. Reported in Today’s Family Lawyer.
Rosenfeld, M. J. (2018). Who wants the breakup? Gender and breakup in heterosexual couples. In Social Networks and the Life Course. Springer. (First presented at the American Sociological Association meeting, 2015.)
Stanley, S. M., & Rhoades, G. K. (2023). What's the Plan? Cohabitation, Engagement, and Divorce. Institute for Family Studies.
U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2012). Retirement Security: Women Still Face Challenges. GAO-12-699.
Wolfinger, N. H. (2015). Want to Avoid Divorce? Wait to Get Married, But Not Too Long. Institute for Family Studies.