In recent decades cohabitation has become increasingly common around the world. We explore this second point below.Īn arrangement where two or more people are not married but live together is referred to as cohabitation. There are two causes for this: an increasing share of people in younger cohorts are not getting married and younger cohorts are increasingly choosing to marry later in life. English men in more recent cohorts are much less likely to have married, and that’s true at all ages. Among those born in 1980 only about 25% were married by age 30. Of those men who were born in 1940, about 83% were married by age 30. The chart here uses those records to give marriage rates by age and year of birth for five cohorts of men in England and Wales.įor instance, you can look at 30-year-olds, and see what percentage of them in each cohort was married. In many rich countries there are statistical records going back several generations, allowing us to estimate marriage rates by age and year of birth. This chart looks at the change in marriages from a different angle and answers the question: How likely were people in different generations to be married by a given age? In China, Russia and Bangladesh, for example, marriages are more common today than a couple of decades ago. Over the period 1990 – 2010 there was a decline in marriage rates in the majority of countries around the world.īut there’s still a lot of cross-country variation around this general trend, and in some countries changes are going in the opposite direction. The UK and Australia, for example, have also seen marriage rates declining for decades, and are currently at the lowest point in recorded history.įor non-rich countries the data is sparse, but available estimates from Latin America, Africa and Asia suggest that the decline of marriages is not exclusive to rich countries. But in terms of changes over time, the trend looks similar for other rich countries. The chart also shows that in comparison to other rich countries, the US has had particularly high historical marriage rates. How did marriage rates change around the world? Since 1972, marriage rates in the US have fallen by almost 50%, and are currently at the lowest point in recorded history.
The long decline started in the 1970s.Marriage rates fell again in the 1950s and then bounced back in the 1960s.In the 1930s marriages became again more common and in 1946 – the year after the Second World War ended – marriages reached a peak of 16.4 marriages per 1,000 people. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the rate fell sharply.Marriages in the US then were almost twice as common as today. In 1920, shortly after the First World War, there were 12 marriages annually for every 1,000 people in the US.
This lets us see when the decline started, and trace the influence of social and economic changes during the process. Marriage rates in the US over the last centuryįor the US we have data on marriage rates going back to the start of the 20th century. You can change the selection of countries using the optionĭirectly in the interactive chart. It combines data from multiple sources, including statistical country offices and reports from the UN, Eurostat and the OECD. The chart here shows this trend for a selection of countries. The proportion of people who are getting married is going down in many countries across the world.
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