Divorce Statistics [2026]

The U.S. recorded 672,502 divorces in 2023 — a crude rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, down from a 1979 peak of 5.3, according to CDC / NCHS 2024. Divorce rates have fallen across most high-income countries for four decades, though the pace and causes differ by jurisdiction. This post compiles divorce statistics across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and OECD peers — covering rates, trends, demographic splits, and methodology. For a Canada-specific view including provincial breakdowns, see Canadian divorce statistics. See the family law research hub for related posts.

What counts as a divorce — and how it differs from legal separation and annulment

A divorce is the legal termination of a valid marriage by court order. It differs from legal separation — which allows spouses to live apart and divide finances without ending the marriage — and from annulment, which declares that a valid marriage never existed. In Canada, only courts can grant divorces under the federal Divorce Act; unmarried and common-law couples who separate are governed exclusively by provincial or territorial family law, not the Divorce Act, according to Department of Justice Canada 2024.

The key distinctions:

• Divorce ends a valid marriage by court order. In Canada it proceeds under the federal Divorce Act (RSC 1985, c. 3), which applies to all married couples regardless of province. The only ground for divorce under s. 8 is marriage breakdown, proved most commonly by one year of separation. Cruelty or adultery are also accepted grounds under s. 8(2), per Department of Justice Canada — Divorce Act 2023.
• Legal separation does not end the marriage. Separated spouses remain legally married; rules governing their property, support, and parenting arrangements fall under provincial or territorial family law, not the federal Divorce Act. A couple can be permanently separated without ever divorcing.
• Annulment is a court declaration that a valid marriage never existed — grounds include bigamy, incapacity, or non-consummation in jurisdictions that recognize it. Annulment is rare in modern Canadian family law and does not generate divorce statistics.
• Section 8(3) of the Divorce Act clarifies that a separation period is not broken by reconciliation attempts lasting up to 90 days — a provision designed to allow couples to attempt reunion without resetting the one-year clock.

Global divorce rates: how Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and OECD peers compare

Cross-national divorce comparisons are complicated by inconsistent denominators: the CDC reports per 1,000 total population; Statistics Canada reports per 1,000 married persons; the ONS reports per 1,000 married men and women separately. The OECD harmonises to a crude rate for comparability, but country-year data gaps persist. With those caveats, the following table presents the best-available figures from primary sources.

Canada’s relative moderation has been consistent for decades. A Department of Justice Canada 2000 analysis found Canada’s 1997 national divorce rate of 223 per 100,000 was lower than the United Kingdom (273), Australia (280), and the United States (430 per 100,000) — a pattern that held through 2020 when Canada’s crude rate of 1.1 per 1,000 remained well below the OECD average.

England and Wales recorded 102,678 divorces in 2023 — a sharp rebound from 2022’s rate of 6.7 per 1,000 married men, which had been the lowest since 1971, per ONS 2025. The 2023 jump is partly attributed to a backlog of cases processed under the new no-fault divorce legislation that took effect in April 2022.

Cohort data from the ONS provides a richer picture than the annual rate: 40.7% of marriages formed in England and Wales in 1998 had ended in divorce by the couples’ 25th anniversary, compared with only 16.8% of the 2013 cohort by their 10th anniversary — reflecting the declining propensity to divorce in more recent cohorts, per ONS 2025.

How divorce rates have changed over time: from the 1980 peak to 2023

Divorce rates in most high-income countries followed a broadly similar arc: rapid rise through the 1960s and 1970s, a peak around 1979–1987 depending on jurisdiction, and a multi-decade decline that has continued into the 2020s. Three jurisdiction-specific hooks anchor the trend.

United States — from 5.3 to 2.4 per 1,000 (1979–2023). The U.S. divorce rate reached its all-time recorded peak of 5.3 divorces per 1,000 population in 1979 — up from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1962 — then fell to 5.2 in 1980, the first annual decline in 18 years, according to CDC 1983. By 2023, it had fallen to 2.4 per 1,000 in provisional CDC data. The refined divorce rate — divorces per 1,000 married women, a more precise indicator — fell from 22.6 at its 1980 peak to 20.5 in 2008, then dropped more sharply to 14.4 in 2023, per Pew Research Center 2025. The decline is largely compositional: as marriage rates fall, the married population has shifted toward more highly educated adults who divorce at lower rates.

Canada — 50-year low in 2020. Canada’s all-time peak in divorce numbers came in 1987, when 97,773 divorces were granted — a surge directly triggered by 1985 amendments to the Divorce Act that reduced the minimum separation period from three years to one year, pushing the rate to 362 per 100,000 people, per Statistics Canada 2022. The rate declined steadily from 12.7 per 1,000 married persons in 1991 to 7.5 in 2019, then dropped sharply to 5.6 in 2020 — the largest single-year fall since 1968, and partly attributed to pandemic-related court delays and backlogs.

England and Wales — the April 2022 no-fault law effect. The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act came into force in April 2022, eliminating the requirement to prove fault (adultery, unreasonable behaviour, or separation periods). By 2023, 74.2% of all divorces in England and Wales were granted under the new no-fault law, with 73.1% of new-law cases filed as sole applications — removing the adversarial dynamic of fault-based petitions, per ONS 2025. The ONS notes that 2022’s historically low rate partly reflects a transition-year filing backlog rather than a genuine reduction in marital breakdown.

Who is most likely to divorce: age, education, income, and ethnicity

Divorce risk is not uniformly distributed across the population. Age at first marriage, educational attainment, race and nativity, and employment status each show substantial independent gradients in U.S. data, which provides the largest sample base for demographic analysis.

• Age at first marriage is among the strongest predictors. Among baby-boomer Americans tracked in the BLS NLSY79 2024 cohort study, marriages that began between ages 15 and 22 ended in divorce at a rate of 58%, compared with 43% for those starting at ages 23–28 and 36% for those starting at ages 29–34. By age 55, 40% of all NLSY79 respondents had divorced at least once; among ever-married respondents, the share reached 46%.
• Educational attainment shows a sharp gradient. Among U.S. adults who have ever married, Pew Research Center 2025 found 25% of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher had divorced, compared with 37% of high school graduates or those with less education and 41% of those with some college. A separate BLS Monthly Labor Review 2013 analysis using the same NLSY79 cohort found approximately 27% of bachelor’s-degree holders had divorced by age 48, versus 45% of high school dropouts and 43% of high school graduates or those with some college.
• Race and nativity also show significant variation. Pew Research Center 2025 found 41% of Black Americans and 36% of U.S.-born adults overall had divorced, compared with 22% of foreign-born adults and 16% of Asian Americans — among the widest demographic gaps in the divorce literature.
• Marriage cohort effects are substantial. One-third of ever-married Americans (33%) had experienced divorce by 2023; among those who married in the 1970s and 1980s — now in their 60s and 70s — the share reached 46–47%, reflecting the high-divorce era in which those unions formed, per Pew Research Center 2025.
• Employment and income. Divorced working-age men in the United States show a 15-percentage-point employment gap relative to married men (73% employed vs. 88%), while divorced working-age women show a higher employment rate than married women (76% vs. 71%), per Pew Research Center 2025. Divorced adults also have substantially lower household wealth: $98,700 median versus $326,900–$329,100 for married adults.

Second marriages and gray divorce: how rates change with remarriage and age

The aggregate decline in divorce rates masks a divergence by age group. While divorce fell for younger adults over the past four decades, divorce among adults aged 50 and older — so-called “gray divorce” — rose sharply and has only recently plateaued.

The gray divorce rate doubled between 1990 and 2015 — from 5 to 10 per 1,000 married persons — while the rate for those 65 and older tripled to 6 per 1,000. By 2023 it had stabilised at 10.3 per 1,000 married women 50+, roughly unchanged from its 2008 peak of 11.0, per Pew Research Center. About 48% of gray divorces in 2015 involved spouses in a second or higher-order marriage.

Remarriage substantially increases divorce risk at every age. Among adults 50+, the 2015 divorce rate for the remarried (16 per 1,000) was double that of first-marriage adults (8 per 1,000). Approximately 66% of divorced Americans have remarried overall, per Pew Research Center 2025. Among those who had been divorced or widowed by 2013, 64% of men had remarried compared with 52% of women — a gender gap that had narrowed from 20 percentage points in 1980, per Pew Research Center 2014.

For first marriages, the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth found the probability of disruption (separation or divorce) reaches 22% within 5 years, 36% within 10 years, and 45% within 15 years among women aged 15–44, using 2011–2015 data. For second marriages, the 10-year disruption rate of 46% is comparable to first marriages, though the 5-year rate fell from 31% (2006–2010 cohort) to 26% (2011–2015 cohort) — suggesting short-term remarriage stability has improved, per CDC / NCHS 2023.

What the divorce rate trend means for families involved in property disputes and custody

The multi-decade decline in divorce rates has not reduced the complexity of individual divorce proceedings. As couples wait longer before divorcing — the median U.S. marriage duration rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023, per Pew Research Center 2025 — the financial entanglement at dissolution is typically larger, involving accumulated assets, pension benefits, and established parenting arrangements.

The economic gap between married and divorced adults in the United States is substantial. Divorced working-age adults have a median household income of $84,900, compared with $118,600 for currently married adults — a 28% gap — and median household wealth of $98,700 versus $326,900–$329,100 for married adults, per Pew Research Center 2025. These figures reflect both the causal effect of divorce on household finances and the selection effect of higher-income adults having lower divorce rates.

In England and Wales, 74.2% of divorces in 2023 were filed under the no-fault Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act, with median marriage duration of 12.7 years for opposite-sex couples and shorter durations for same-sex couples (7.2 years for male same-sex couples, 6.3 years for female same-sex couples), per ONS 2025. The shift to sole no-fault applications has reduced adversarial court proceedings in the UK — a structural change with implications for how quickly property and parenting disputes can be resolved.

In Canada, divorce cases consistently account for roughly one-third of all family cases in civil courts. A Statistics Canada Juristat 2010 analysis of 2008–2009 data found fewer than 2% of active divorce cases proceeded to trial — the vast majority of property, support, and parenting disputes were resolved through negotiation, mediation, or consent orders. For families where asset-hiding or hidden-cohabitation concerns arise during proceedings, divorce investigation services can provide documented evidence for use in property and support negotiations. Our practical breakdown of hidden assets in Ontario divorce covers the categories investigators most often surface — undisclosed accounts, cash-business income, transferred property, and cryptocurrency holdings.

Among U.S. adults who divorced, 40% of divorces occurred within the first decade of marriage — 16% in the first five years and 24% in years five through nine — while nearly 22% happened after 25 or more years of marriage, per Pew Research Center 2025. The timing has implications for what assets are at stake: early divorces typically involve lower joint wealth, while divorces after 20+ years involve pension-splitting, long-term support claims, and more complex child custody investigation work for older children. Infidelity is among the top three cited reasons for divorce in survey research — for a deeper look, see our compilation of infidelity statistics and trends, or the service overview for cheating spouse investigations.

How to read divorce statistics: methodology, data sources, and what the numbers miss

Published divorce rates are not directly comparable across jurisdictions because of fundamental differences in how they are calculated and what data they draw from.

CDC / NCHS 2024 notes that national U.S. divorce estimates have covered only 45 states since the suspension of detailed data collection in 1996 — California, Georgia, Indiana, and Louisiana do not submit divorce data to the national vital statistics system. Statistics Canada’s Divorce Database (SDDS 3235) receives records from provincial and territorial courts, making it methodologically distinct from the CDC’s vital statistics model.

The average duration of Canadian marriages ending in divorce rose from 12.5 years in 1980 to 15.3 years in 2020, per Statistics Canada 2022, while the average age at divorce climbed — reaching 44.5 years for women and 47.0 years for men as of 2017. These trends suggest couples are delaying rather than avoiding dissolution. The apparent decline in crude divorce rates in recent years is largely explained by compositional shifts: fewer lower-educated adults — who divorce at higher rates — are now entering marriage, so the pool of married people at risk of divorce has shifted toward more stable demographics.

What the numbers miss: divorce statistics do not capture legal separations (couples who separate and never formally divorce), the dissolution of common-law unions (which are outside the Divorce Act entirely in Canada), or the full economic and custody consequences that follow a divorce filing. The Pew Research Center 2025 refined rate of 14.4 per 1,000 married women in 2023 — versus the crude rate of 2.4 per 1,000 — illustrates how dramatically the choice of denominator shapes the story the data tells. For researchers and policymakers, the refined rate is the more meaningful indicator; for headline comparisons, the crude rate is most frequently cited, with all its structural limitations.