Interracial Marriage Statistics: What Pew's Data Shows

Who people marry is one of the clearest records of who they actually meet, date and take seriously. Intermarriage data shows how much that has changed in two generations, and how much it still depends on the pool of people around you.

The most cited source is Pew Research Center's 2017 report Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia, built on the Census Bureau's 2015 American Community Survey. It's the most detailed recent breakdown available, so it's worth reading closely, including where it's now dated.

How Common Is Interracial Marriage in the U.S.?

17% of newlyweds in 2015 were married to someone of a different race or ethnicity. That's newlyweds, meaning people married in the prior year. Across all married people, including couples married decades ago, the share was about one in ten, or roughly 11 million people.

The 1967 baseline matters. That year the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia, striking down state bans on interracial marriage. At the time, 3% of newlyweds were intermarried. The increase to 17% is more than fivefold.

One definitional point: Pew counts marriages between a Hispanic and a non-Hispanic spouse as intermarriage, alongside marriages across racial categories. That's why the most common intermarried pairing is one Hispanic and one white spouse (42%), followed by white and Asian (15%) and white and multiracial (12%).

Intermarriage Rates by Race and Ethnicity

Rates differ a lot by group:

Nativity changes the picture for Asian and Hispanic newlyweds. Among the U.S.-born, 46% of Asian and 39% of Hispanic newlyweds were intermarried. Immigrants are more likely to marry within their group, which pulls the overall rate down.

The fastest growth was among Black newlyweds, whose intermarriage rate more than tripled from 5% in 1980 to 18% in 2015. White newlyweds roughly tripled too, from 4% to 11%, but remain the least likely of the major groups to intermarry.

The Gender Gaps Are Large

Within two groups, men and women intermarry at very different rates:

• Black newlyweds: 24% of men vs. 12% of women had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity.
• Asian newlyweds: 36% of women vs. 21% of men.

Among white and Hispanic newlyweds the differences were small (12% of white men vs. 10% of white women; 26% of Hispanic men vs. 28% of Hispanic women).

For Black newlyweds, the gap widens with education. Among those with a high school diploma or less, 17% of men and 10% of women were intermarried. Among those with a bachelor's degree, it was 30% of men and 13% of women.

Education and Age

Intermarriage rises modestly with education overall: 14% of newlyweds with a high school diploma or less, 18% with some college and 19% with a bachelor's degree or more.

The education effect is strongest among Hispanic newlyweds: 46% of those with a bachelor's degree were intermarried, versus 16% with a high school diploma or less. Pew notes this is driven partly, but not entirely, by the higher share of immigrants among less-educated Hispanics. Asian newlyweds break the pattern: intermarriage peaked among those with some college (39%), higher than among those with more (29%) or less (26%) education.

By age, newlyweds in their 30s were the most likely to intermarry (18%), compared with 13% of those 50 and older.

Does Living in a City Make Interracial Marriage More Likely?

On average, yes: 18% of metro-area newlyweds were intermarried versus 11% outside metro areas. But the explanation is more specific than "cities are more open-minded."

The metro gap is driven entirely by white newlyweds, who were about twice as likely to intermarry in metro areas (12% vs. 6%). For Asian newlyweds it ran the other way, 47% outside metro areas vs. 28% inside them. Hispanic newlyweds showed the same reversal (32% vs. 25%), and Black newlyweds intermarried at the same rate in both (18%).

The likely mechanism is the pool. Metro areas have more diverse "marriage markets," which Pew defines as all unmarried and recently married adults. Where a group makes up a smaller share of the local pool, its members are more likely to marry outside it.

That's also the story across cities. Of the 126 metro areas Pew analyzed (all those with at least 200 newlyweds in the data), Honolulu was highest at 42%, with Las Vegas and Santa Barbara around 30%. Honolulu's marriage market was 42% Asian, 20% non-Hispanic white and 9% Hispanic. At the low end, about 3% of newlyweds in Jackson, Mississippi and Asheville, North Carolina were intermarried.

Diversity doesn't explain everything. Jackson's marriage market was diverse (61% Black, 36% white), yet intermarriage was rare. Pew points to attitudes as one possible factor: 13% of adults in the South said more interracial marriage was bad for society, compared with 4% in the West and 5% in the Northeast.

For a sense of how varied New York's own dating pool is, see our breakdown of NYC singles by borough.

How Attitudes Have Shifted

Two measures show how fast opinion moved:

• In 1990, 63% of nonblack adults said they'd be very or somewhat opposed to a close relative marrying a Black person. In the most recent General Social Survey data Pew cited, that was 14%.
• In a 2017 Pew survey, 39% said more people marrying across races is good for society, up from 24% in 2010. The share calling it bad fell from 13% to 9%. Most of the rest said it made little difference.

Views differed by place: 45% in urban areas called it good for society, compared with 38% in suburban areas and 24% in rural areas.

What This Means If You're Dating in New York

Your pool shapes your outcomes more than you think. The single strongest pattern in this data is that who people marry tracks who's around them. That's true for race and ethnicity, and it's the same logic behind research on how couples actually meet: proximity and social networks do a lot of the choosing before you do.

Stated preferences are a starting point, not a ceiling. Many people describe a "type" that's really a description of the people they've happened to meet. We've written about what having a type costs you; if your past relationships all came from the same few circles, widening the circle is the most direct way to change the result.

Similarity still matters, just not always the visible kind. Research on whether opposites attract consistently finds that similar values and outlook predict satisfaction. Background is one input; shared priorities are the ones that hold a relationship together.

The Bottom Line

Interracial and interethnic marriage went from rare to routine in two generations: 3% of newlyweds in 1967, 17% in 2015, with about 11 million married people in intermarriages. The rate depends heavily on group, gender, nativity and the local pool of potential partners, and attitudes have shifted even faster than behavior. The numbers are a decade old and the current figure is likely higher, but the pattern underneath them is durable: people marry from the pool they actually meet.

Sources:

• Intermarriage in the U.S. 50 Years After Loving v. Virginia — Gretchen Livingston and Anna Brown, Pew Research Center (2017), analysis of the 2015 American Community Survey
• Trends and Patterns in Intermarriage — Pew Research Center (2017), chapter 1 of the report
• Public Views on Intermarriage — Pew Research Center (2017), chapter 2 of the report
• In U.S. metro areas, huge variation in intermarriage rates — Gretchen Livingston, Pew Research Center (2017)