In 1980, just 6.7 percent of new marriages in the United States were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity. By 2015, that figure had climbed to 17 percent among newlyweds — and among some groups, the increase runs even steeper than the national number suggests. The shift is one of the most consistently documented trends in American family life, tracked for decades by Pew Research Center, and the data behind it says less about romance in the abstract and more about exactly which parts of the country are changing, and how fast.
The Long Climb, By The Numbers
Pew’s research divides the story into two related measures: newlyweds in a given year, and the total population of married people at any point in time. Both tell the same story at different speeds. Looking at all married couples regardless of when they wed, Pew found the intermarried share rose from 3.2 percent in 1980 to 8.4 percent in 2010, and continued climbing to roughly 10 percent by 2015, according to Pew’s follow-up analysis marking 50 years since Loving v. Virginia. That is more than triple the 1980 rate, and the newlywed figures — which capture what’s happening right now rather than the accumulated past — show an even sharper climb for specific groups.
Which Groups Are Actually Driving It
The overall newlywed intermarriage rate is a national average, and averages hide a lot. Pew’s 2017 report breaks the number down by race, and the differences are large. Among Black newlyweds, the intermarriage rate went from 5 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2015 — more than tripling, and the steepest climb of any group Pew tracked. White newlyweds, the largest group in absolute numbers, saw a smaller relative jump: from 4 percent in 1980 to 11 percent in 2015. By 2015, Asian newlyweds had the highest overall intermarriage rate of any group at 29 percent, followed closely by Hispanic newlyweds at 27 percent — both far above the white newlywed rate, even though white Americans make up the majority of the country’s population.
Gender matters inside those numbers too. Pew’s data shows Black men intermarry at roughly double the rate of Black women (24 percent versus 12 percent), while the pattern flips for Asian Americans: Asian women intermarry far more often than Asian men (36 percent versus 21 percent). Hispanic and white newlyweds, by contrast, show almost no gender gap at all. None of these patterns are explained by a single cause, but researchers who study intermarriage generally point to a mix of shifting immigration patterns, generational change in attitudes, and where different communities are geographically concentrated.
Geography Still Matters More Than People Assume
Where a couple lives turns out to predict intermarriage almost as strongly as who they are. Pew found that 18 percent of newlyweds in U.S. metropolitan areas were intermarried, compared with just 11 percent in non-metro areas — and the gap is starkest for white Americans specifically, who intermarry at roughly twice the rate in metro areas as in rural ones. That geographic split has held steady even as the overall national numbers have climbed, suggesting that proximity and everyday exposure to a more diverse range of people remain one of the strongest predictors of who ends up marrying outside their own racial or ethnic group.
The trend has also been picked up well beyond academic circles. NBC News covered Pew’s data as evidence of a broader shift in acceptance, not just behavior — a distinction Pew’s own researchers have made too. The data captures marriages that actually happened, but the attitudes underneath them have moved even further; national surveys have long shown that approval of interracial marriage in the U.S. runs well above the share of marriages that are actually interracial, meaning the number of people willing to intermarry, given the chance, is larger than the number who have.
What The Long View Shows
Put the 1980 and 2015 numbers side by side and the overall pattern is unmistakable: intermarriage in America has not edged upward, it has compounded, decade over decade, across nearly every racial and ethnic group Pew tracks — with Black Americans and Asian Americans driving the sharpest relative gains, and geography still shaping who has the chance to meet a partner outside their own group in the first place. Whatever comes next for the American family, the data suggests it will look less like any single decade’s marriages and more like a running average of a country that keeps getting more interconnected than the one before it.
