Who Earns More in Marriage? What the Data Shows

Money comes up in dating long before it comes up in marriage: who pays, how ambitious someone is, whether their career will collide with yours. Underneath those conversations is an old expectation that the man will earn more. The data shows how much that's changed, and how much hasn't.

The best recent source is Pew Research Center's 2023 report In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same, by Richard Fry, Carolina Aragão, Kiley Hurst and Kim Parker. It combines Census Bureau earnings data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey and a survey of 5,152 U.S. adults.

How Pew Defines the Types of Marriage

Pew sorts opposite-sex marriages by each spouse's share of the couple's combined earnings:

• Egalitarian: both spouses earn between 40% and 60% of the total.
• Husband primary breadwinner: he earns more than 60%, and she has earnings too.
• Husband sole breadwinner: only he has earnings.
• Wife primary / sole breadwinner: the same, reversed.

That 40–60% band matters. "Egalitarian" doesn't mean identical salaries. A couple where one earns $110,000 and the other $90,000 counts.

How Many Wives Earn More Than Their Husbands?

Within that 16%, wives were the primary earner (with a husband who also earns) in 10% of marriages and the sole earner in 6%.

Across all opposite-sex marriages in 2022, median earnings were $35,000 for wives and $65,000 for husbands. The shift is real, but the typical marriage still has a husband earning more.

Who Is Most Likely to Be a Breadwinner Wife?

Pew found clear differences by education, race and age:

• Education: 19% of wives with at least a bachelor's degree were the sole or primary breadwinner, compared with 11% of wives without a high school diploma.
• Relative education: When the wife had more education than her husband, she was the breadwinner in 25% of marriages, versus 11% when she had less. In 2022, 24% of marriages had a wife with more education than her husband, up from 19% in 1972.
• Race: About 26% of Black wives out-earned their husbands, the highest share of any group Pew reported.
• Age: 11% of wives ages 25 to 34 were the breadwinner, compared with 22% of wives ages 55 to 64.

That last point is easy to miss. Younger wives are less likely than older ones to be the main earner, a pattern consistent with earnings changing over the life course, including around the years when children are young.

Who Does the Housework When She Earns More?

This is where the data gets less balanced. Using the American Time Use Survey, Pew compared how spouses spend their weeks in each type of marriage.

In egalitarian marriages, husbands spent more time on paid work (44.2 hours a week vs. 41.1 for wives) and more on leisure, while wives spent more on caregiving and housework.

In marriages where the wife is the primary earner, she worked slightly more paid hours than her husband (42 vs. 40.4) and still did more caregiving and housework. Her husband had about 9 more hours of leisure a week (29.9 vs. 21.1).

In marriages where the husband is the primary earner, he worked substantially more paid hours (46.7 vs. 33.4), she did much more caregiving and housework, and leisure was roughly equal.

Does It Matter for the Relationship If She Earns More?

The most cited research here is a 2015 paper by economists Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan, "Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (the NBER working paper version is from 2013). They argued that a norm against wives out-earning husbands shapes behavior. Their evidence included:

• A sharp drop in the number of couples just past the point where she earns more than half, which they read as couples being less willing to form when her income exceeds his.
• Couples where the wife earns more reporting lower marital satisfaction and a higher likelihood of divorce.
• A larger gender gap in housework when the wife earns more.

What the public believes is clearer. In Pew's 2023 survey, 48% of adults said most men married to women would prefer to earn more than their wife. Views on women were split: 22% said most women want a husband who earns more, 26% said most want to earn about the same and 7% said most want to earn more.

Pew also found 77% of adults say children raised by a mother and father are better off when both parents focus equally on work and home. Just 19% favored the father focusing on work and the mother on home, and 2% the reverse.

What This Means If You're Dating

Expect it to come up. With nearly half of marriages either egalitarian or wife-led on earnings, many couples will have a woman earning as much or more. Treating that as unusual is out of date. Our post on financial compatibility covers how to talk about money before it becomes a problem.

Talk about the work at home, not just the money. The biggest imbalance in this data isn't earnings. It's time. If you're an ambitious professional dating another one, how you'll split the unpaid work matters as much as who pays for dinner. Research on living together before marriage is a useful read on how couples test these arrangements.

Check your own assumptions. If you'd be uncomfortable earning less than a partner, or dating someone who earns less than you, that's worth knowing about yourself before it shapes who you overlook. High earners often run into this; see why successful people struggle with dating.

The Bottom Line

The male-breadwinner marriage has gone from the overwhelming norm to a bare majority in 50 years: 85% of marriages in 1972, 55% in 2022. Nearly three in ten are now egalitarian on earnings, and one in six has a wife as the main or only earner. What hasn't caught up is the division of time at home, where wives still do more on average even when they earn more. Whether earning more causes friction in a marriage is less settled than often claimed. What's clear is that couples now have to negotiate what used to be assumed.

Sources:

• In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages, Husbands and Wives Earn About the Same — Richard Fry, Carolina Aragão, Kiley Hurst and Kim Parker, Pew Research Center (2023), using Census Bureau Current Population Survey and BLS American Time Use Survey data
• Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households — Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan, NBER Working Paper 19023 (2013); published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2015)
• Gender Identity, Coworking Spouses, and Relative Income within Households — Natalia Zinovyeva and Maryna Tverdostup, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 13(4), 258–284 (2021)