US: more weddings, fewer divorces – new figures from health agency CDC

Americans are marrying a little more often again and divorcing less. According to provisional figures from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2,128,446 marriages took place in 2024. That is 6.3 marriages per 1,000 people, up from 6.1 in 2023 and also 6.1 in the pre-pandemic year 2019. In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the rate had slumped to 5.1. The news site Axios analysed the data on 14 October.

At the same time, the number of divorces and annulments fell to 662,950. That is 2.3 per 1,000 people, down from 2.4 in 2023 and 2.7 in 2019. Measured only against married people, the divorce rate is now about 13 per 1,000, according to an Axios analysis of CDC and census data – in 2008 it was around 19. Jake Hays, a research associate at the Pew Research Center, told Axios that part of the explanation is that over time the married population has shifted towards adults with higher levels of education. At the same time, according to Axios, more than three quarters of 38- to 43-year-olds have lived with an unmarried partner at some point.

The figures should be read with care: they are provisional, and the divorce statistics exclude data from California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota and New Mexico, so the CDC calculates the divorce rate on a smaller population base than the marriage rate. The statistics also show only trends, not causes – for example, whether couples stay together longer today or whether fewer people who would later split up are marrying in the first place.