The US Divorce Rate Is at a 50-Year Low. Here's the Actual Data

The Number Everyone Quotes Is From 1980

"Half of all marriages end in divorce" is probably the single most repeated statistic in American dating conversation, and it's a fossil. It traces to projections made during the divorce boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the crude divorce rate peaked above 5 per 1,000 population. The rate has been falling for four decades since. The 50% figure survives because it's memorable and because it flatters a certain cynicism about commitment, not because current data supports it.

What the data actually shows is a country where both marriage and divorce have become less common — and where the couples who do marry are staying married at higher rates than their parents did.

The CDC Numbers, 2000 to 2023

The National Center for Health Statistics publishes provisional counts and rates annually. The trend across the century so far:

Two things stand out. The divorce rate has fallen every few years without exception since 2000, from 4.0 to 2.4 — a 40% decline. And the marriage rate's drop from 8.2 to 6.1 is nearly as steep, which means the divorce decline can't be explained by a marriage boom diluting the numbers. Both behaviors are contracting.

The Pandemic Dip and Rebound

2020 shows up clearly: marriages collapsed to 1.68 million (a 5.1 rate), the lowest in the series, as weddings were postponed en masse. Divorces fell too, to 2.3 — courts closed, and couples deferred. The 2021 rebound brought marriages up 18% from the trough, and 2022 crossed 2 million for the first time since 2019. Divorce, notably, did not rebound to pre-pandemic levels; it settled at 2.4, below the 2019 figure of 2.7. The predicted post-lockdown divorce wave didn't materialize in the national data.

Why Divorce Is Falling: Later, More Selective Marriage

The demographic explanation most researchers favor connects directly to the marriage-timing data covered in age gaps and marriage timing: Americans now marry at a median age above 30 for men and around 28.6 for women, up nearly eight years from the 1950s. Very early marriages have historically been the most fragile, and there are far fewer of them. Add the broader decline in marriage overall — the people still choosing to marry are a more selected, more committed subset than when marriage was near-universal — and the falling divorce rate follows almost mechanically.

Bowling Green's National Center for Family & Marriage Research tracks a related figure, the marriage-to-divorce ratio, which has held around 2.1 to 2.2 marriages per divorce through the late 2010s and ticked up in the latest data. That's consistent with the CDC picture: for every divorce, more than two marriages.

What This Means for Someone Dating Now

The practical read is that the pessimism baked into "half of marriages fail" is out of date, and the couples marrying in the current environment — later, more deliberately, after longer courtships — face better odds than the folk statistic implies. It also reframes the anxiety about marrying "late." The 30s dating pool isn't a sign of a broken market; it's the demographic shift that's driving divorce down. Taking time to find the right match, and treating the knowing-each-other period as the investment the research says it is, is the behavior the data rewards.

Sources:

• Provisional number of marriages and marriage rate, and divorces and divorce rate: United States, 2000–2023 — CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System
• Marriage-Divorce Ratio in the U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2023 — National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University