Fifty-three percent of engaged or married Americans under 45 say they’ve signed a prenuptial agreement, according to a Harris Poll survey published in July 2026. That’s up from 41% of Gen Z and 34% of Millennials who reported having one in 2022, according to the same poll.
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The jump looks even sharper against a longer timeline. Prenup adoption among younger couples sat at roughly 8% back in the 1990s, according to First’s 2026 Prenup Report, which references the same Harris Poll data. That puts today’s under-45 rate at roughly six times what it was three decades ago, even as prenups remain far less common across the broader married population, where about 20% report having signed one.
Part of the shift traces back to when people are marrying in the first place. Women married for the first time at an average age of 28.4 in 2025 and men at 30.8, compared with roughly 25 and 27 in 2005. Couples marrying later tend to enter a relationship with more individual assets, retirement savings and sometimes existing businesses to protect, which shifts a prenup from a symbol of distrust to a basic piece of financial planning.
Demand is also shifting who’s asking. Prenup requests at one firm have more than doubled over the past three years, driven primarily by women, according to First’s report. That marks a departure from the older assumption that prenups mainly protected a wealthier spouse, usually the husband, from a costlier divorce.
The framing around prenups has changed along with who’s requesting them. Rather than a document one partner presents to protect a fortune from the other, more couples now describe drafting one together as a joint exercise in transparency, laying out debts, income and expectations before a marriage begins rather than after it ends. That mirrors how the agreements get framed in First’s 2026 report, which describes them as a couple’s first real conversation about combined finances rather than a hedge against divorce.
The rise also lines up with a generation that watched student loan balances, dual-income households and gig work complicate what “shared finances” even means once two people combine everything they’ve built separately.
Key Points
- 53% of engaged or married Americans under 45 have signed a prenup, per the Harris Poll.
- That’s up from 34-41% among the same age groups just four years earlier.
- The rate sits near six times the roughly 8% seen in the 1990s.
Family law offices increasingly frame prenups less as a pre-divorce document and more as a financial planning tool couples draft alongside a will or a shared budget.
