Wives are now the primary breadwinner in 16% of American marriages, more than triple the 5% recorded in 1972, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of Current Population Survey data. Husbands remain the primary or sole earner in 55% of marriages, but that’s down sharply from 85% five decades ago, and the gap between the two trend lines keeps narrowing.
Key Points
- Breadwinner wives (earning 60% or more of household income) rose from 5% of marriages in 1972 to 16% in 2022, per Pew Research.
- Egalitarian marriages, where both spouses earn 40-60% of combined income, jumped from 11% to 29% over the same period.
- Using a broader definition — any wife out-earning her husband — the Institute for Family Studies, drawing on American Community Survey data, puts the current share at 25% of married couples, up from just 6% in 1960.
- The U.S. Census Bureau’s own 2015 analysis found the share of couples where wives out-earned husbands by $30,000 or more rose from 6% in 2000 to 9% in 2015, while the reverse gap shrank from 38% to 35%.
The climb isn’t evenly distributed. Pew’s data shows breadwinner wives are most common among Black women (26%), women without children (20%), and wives ages 55 to 64 (22%), a group that has had the longest runway to out-earn a spouse through raises and seniority. The Institute for Family Studies found an even sharper age pattern, with 28% of wives 55 to 65 out-earning husbands, and Black married women reaching 35% — nearly double the overall rate.
Education plays a role too. Wives with a bachelor’s degree or higher are considerably more likely to out-earn their husbands than wives without one, a gap that tracks the decades-long trend of women outpacing men in college completion. Census Bureau statistician Jamie Lewis called the shift “noteworthy” in the bureau’s own 2015 report, given that a persistent gender wage gap still holds women’s earnings below men’s on average across the broader labor market.
None of this means the shift has erased old patterns at home. Even in marriages where wives earn more, research on household labor consistently finds wives still handle a disproportionate share of housework and childcare — a gap that hasn’t closed at nearly the pace the earnings numbers have. The paycheck math has changed dramatically since 1972. What happens after the paycheck lands is changing much more slowly, and researchers across all three data sets note the same open question: whether the division of labor at home eventually catches up to the numbers on the pay stub, or whether breadwinner wives simply end up working two jobs instead of one.
