Thirty-nine percent of Americans now say it is very important for a couple to be legally married before raising a child together, up 10 percentage points from 29% in 2020, according to Gallup’s newest Values and Beliefs poll.
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The poll was fielded May 1-17, 2026, through telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,001 U.S. adults conducted by ReconMR, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, according to Gallup’s published methodology. The 10-point jump reverses years of decline in how much weight Americans place on marriage as a precondition for parenting.
Key Points
- 39% now call marriage very important for couples raising a child, up from 29% in 2020
- The increase brings the figure back near where it stood roughly 13 years ago
- The poll surveyed 1,001 U.S. adults by telephone, with a margin of error of ±4 points
Gallup has tracked this specific question for over a decade, and the trend line had been pointing the other direction for most of that period. The share of Americans calling marriage very important for child-rearing had been sliding for years before this reading, making the jump back up one of the larger single-poll swings Gallup has recorded on the topic.
The shift arrives alongside broader cultural conversations about family stability, cost of living, and how children fare in different household structures. Gallup’s data doesn’t isolate a single cause for the increase, but the size and direction of the swing mark a break from the gradual erosion in marriage-as-parenting-prerequisite attitudes that had defined most of the 2010s and early 2020s.
The finding sits inside Gallup’s broader Values and Beliefs series, which tracks shifting American attitudes on family, religion, and morality each year. Because the question has been asked consistently over multiple survey waves, the 2026 reading gives researchers a clean before-and-after comparison rather than a one-off data point, and it’s likely to feed into ongoing debates among sociologists and policymakers about whether formal marriage still functions as a marker of family stability in the eyes of the public.
Gallup has not yet indicated when it will next field this question, though the poll has historically been repeated every few years as part of its annual Values and Beliefs survey.
