The U.S. remarriage rate has been cut nearly in half since 2008, according to federal data analyzed by the National Center for Family and Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University, even as most public conversation about American marriage has stayed fixed on divorce.
Key Points
- Men’s remarriage rate fell from 48.9 per 1,000 previously married individuals in 2008 to 34.4 in 2023, per the Bowling Green State University analysis of Census Bureau American Community Survey data.
- Women’s remarriage rate dropped from 25.2 per 1,000 to 18.5 per 1,000 over the same period.
- A separate Bowling Green family profile tracking 2008 to 2018 alone found the overall remarriage rate declined 21% in just that decade.
- About two-thirds of divorced Americans, 66%, do eventually remarry, according to Pew Research Center — but that share is being reached more slowly and less often than in previous decades.
The decline shows up across both men and women, though men’s remarriage rate has fallen further in absolute terms, from just under 49 per 1,000 formerly married men to roughly 34. Women’s rate, already lower to begin with, has followed a similar downward slope. Researchers attribute part of the shift to formerly married adults increasingly choosing long-term cohabitation over a second trip to the altar, alongside later average ages at every stage of relationship milestones. Financial caution after a first marriage’s dissolution, more complex blended-family logistics, and simply having lived independently longer before remarriage becomes a consideration all factor into the numbers, according to the researchers’ analysis.
This trend runs alongside, but separately from, the well-documented rise in “gray divorce” among couples over 50 — a pattern that has drawn far more headlines. Remarriage’s slow fade has drawn comparatively little coverage, in part because a decline is harder to put a face on than a divorce announcement. Pew’s research notes that divorced men still remarry at somewhat higher rates than divorced women, 68% versus 64% across their lifetimes, a gap researchers link partly to differing rates of remarriage among Black Americans compared with other groups.
Taken together, the data points to a structural change in how second chapters of adult relationships now unfold. Fewer formerly married Americans are treating remarriage as the default next step, even as most still eventually find their way to some form of long-term partnership. For a topic that rarely makes a headline of its own, the drop-off is large enough, and steady enough across fifteen years of federal data, to count as one of the more significant shifts in American family life happening largely out of view.
