In 2000, 8.2 out of every 1,000 Americans got married. By 2023, that number had fallen to 6.1 — a drop of roughly 26 percent, according to CDC/NCHS national vital statistics data. Over that same span, the divorce rate fell even harder, from 4.0 per 1,000 people to 2.4 — a 40 percent decline. Marriage is rarer now than it was a generation ago. It’s also, by this measure, more durable.
The marriage rate has been sliding for two decades straight
This isn’t a pandemic blip or a one-year anomaly. The CDC’s marriage-rate figures show a near-uninterrupted downward slope from 2000 onward: 8.2 in 2000, 7.7 by 2003, 7.3 by 2007, 6.8 through most of the early 2010s, and 6.9 as recently as 2019. Then 2020 hit, and the rate cratered to 5.1, the lowest point in the entire 23-year record, as courthouses closed and couples postponed weddings en masse. It bounced back fast: 6.0 in 2021, 6.2 in 2022, 6.1 in 2023. That rebound puts marriage right back where it was pre-pandemic, which is itself the story: “back to normal” for American marriage now means a rate roughly a quarter lower than it was in 2000.
Divorce didn’t just fall — it fell faster than marriage did
Here’s where the data gets more interesting than a simple “marriage is declining” headline suggests. If fewer people are marrying, you’d expect divorce to fall too, just by arithmetic: fewer marriages means fewer marriages available to end. But the divorce rate didn’t decline in step with the marriage rate. It declined faster. In 2000, the divorce rate equaled just under 49 percent of the marriage rate that same year (4.0 versus 8.2). By 2023, divorce had shrunk to about 39 percent of the marriage rate (2.4 versus 6.1). Even accounting for there being fewer marriages overall, a smaller share of them are ending in divorce relative to how many are being formed.
The mid-2000s make the contrast clearer. In 2004, the marriage rate stood at 7.8 and divorce at 3.7, meaning divorce equaled 47 percent of marriage that year. By 2016, marriage had dropped to 7.0, but divorce had fallen further still, to 3.0, or 43 percent of marriage. The gap between the two lines has been widening for years, not just since the pandemic.
It’s also worth noting the divorce figures are, if anything, an undercount. The CDC’s own methodology notes flag that several states, California among them, don’t report complete divorce data for parts of this period, which means the national divorce rate is calculated from an incomplete pool of states in some years. If the missing data skews the picture at all, it likely means the real decline in divorce is at least as steep as what’s reported here, not less.
Fewer weddings, but a different kind of wedding
None of this means marriage is disappearing. It means the marriages that do happen increasingly look different from the ones that were common in 2000. People are marrying later, after longer periods of financial independence, cohabitation, and frequently after having already weighed compatibility over years rather than months. That kind of selectivity doesn’t show up as a single line in a CDC table, but it’s the most plausible explanation for a pattern where fewer people opt in, and the ones who do stay married longer.
It also means the framing of marriage as an institution “in decline” undersells what’s actually happening. A shrinking pool of marriages that’s also a more stable pool isn’t decline in any straightforward sense. It’s a market that’s gotten smaller and more selective at the same time. The people still saying yes are doing so with more information, more independence, and, evidently, more staying power than the couples who married when marriage was closer to a default life stage than a considered choice.
What two decades of numbers actually tell you
Put the two trend lines next to each other and a clean story about American commitment falling apart doesn’t hold up. Fewer people are marrying, full stop. That part of the myth is true. But the idea that marriage itself has gotten flimsier, that couples who do tie the knot are more likely to split than they used to be, runs directly against what the CDC’s own numbers show. Divorce has fallen further and faster than marriage has. The people opting into marriage today are, on the whole, the ones most likely to make it last — which says less about marriage weakening as an institution and more about who’s choosing it, and when.
