The national divorce total everyone cites — 672,502 divorces and annulments in 2023, a rate of 2.4 per 1,000 people — comes with a footnote most people never read: “45 reporting States and D.C.,” according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics FastStats page on marriage and divorce. Five states are missing from that count entirely, and one of them is California.
The excluded states are California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, and New Mexico, according to the CDC’s own state-by-state divorce data page, which explicitly notes that its maps “do not include rates” for those five. That’s not a rounding error. California alone has roughly 39 million residents, more people than live in the 21 smallest states combined.
Why an Entire State Just Doesn’t Show Up
This isn’t a conspiracy or a cover-up. Divorce statistics in the United States are compiled through a voluntary federal-state partnership: NCHS depends on individual states to collect and forward vital records data, and there’s no federal mandate forcing every state to participate in a standardized way. Some states, California included, stopped submitting detailed divorce data to the national vital statistics system decades ago, generally citing cost and administrative burden rather than any attempt to obscure the numbers.
The result is a national figure that sounds authoritative — a clean rate, reported every year, cited by news outlets and researchers alike — while quietly excluding roughly one in eight Americans from the underlying count. A divorce rate built without California isn’t measuring “the country.” It’s measuring most of the country, with a hole in it large enough to swallow a top-five-by-population state whole.
Why This Actually Matters, Not Just Trivia
Whether the missing states skew the national rate up or down isn’t obvious, and that’s part of the problem — nobody can say for certain, because the states aren’t reporting the underlying numbers that would let researchers check. California, Hawaii, and the other missing states have different marriage patterns, different costs of living, different median ages, and different legal processes around divorce than the national average of the 45 reporting states. Folding them in could move the “official” rate in either direction. The honest answer is that nobody currently knows by how much, and that uncertainty rarely makes it into the headline.
This gap has been visible for a long time, not something newly discovered. NCHS has published the reporting-state caveat in its historical data tables going back years, and the list of non-reporting states has shifted somewhat over time, with states like Georgia, Louisiana, and Oklahoma appearing in exclusion footnotes for various past reporting periods. What’s stayed consistent is that the number widely quoted as “America’s divorce rate” has never actually meant all of America.
What People Get Wrong When They Cite It
The common move — quoting the national divorce rate to make a claim about whether marriage is “in decline” or “more stable than people think” — treats a partial count like a complete one. It’s the data equivalent of estimating a family’s grocery bill while skipping the receipt from their biggest shopping trip of the month. The remaining data isn’t useless, but it isn’t the full picture either, and presenting it as such misleads by omission even when nobody involved intends to mislead anyone.
Researchers who need state-level divorce estimates for excluded states typically have to go around NCHS entirely, pulling numbers from each state’s own court or vital records system and calculating rates independently — which is exactly why so few national news stories bother, and why the incomplete federal total keeps getting cited as if it were whole.
Marriage Data Has the Same Blind Spot
It’s worth noting the marriage side of the same FastStats page carries no such asterisk in the same way — the 2,041,926 marriages reported for 2023 and the 6.1-per-1,000 marriage rate come from a broader reporting base, since most states still submit marriage counts even when their divorce records lag. That asymmetry means the “marriages minus divorces” comparisons that show up in casual commentary about the state of American relationships are comparing a fuller dataset against a partial one, without flagging the mismatch.
The Number Isn’t Wrong. It’s Just Not What People Think It Is.
None of this means the 2.4-per-1,000 figure is fabricated or worthless. It’s a real count of real divorces in 45 states and D.C., reported honestly by an agency that discloses its own limitation right there in the footnote. The failure isn’t in the data. It’s in how casually it gets repeated as a national statistic without anyone mentioning that a state the size of California was never in the room.
