A rocky year at work or a demanding boss gets blamed most often when a marriage falls apart, and it makes for an easy story. New analysis of five-year American Community Survey microdata, published by FlowingData in May 2026, complicates that narrative considerably. Looking across roughly 500 occupation codes tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau, the data shows divorce and separation rates swinging by more than 30 percentage points depending on the job someone holds. Bartenders and bus drivers sit near the top of that range. Actuaries and physical scientists sit near the bottom. The gap has less to do with income than most people assume.
1. Other Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Workers — 48.3%. Topping the ranking, as tabulated from the FlowingData figures, is a broad Census category covering healthcare practitioners and technical workers who don’t fit into narrower job codes, at a 48.3% divorce or separation rate among people who have ever married. The grouping spans support roles across hospitals and clinics built around unpredictable overnight and rotating shifts. Most jobs in this bucket also pay considerably less than the physicians and surgeons who sit near the opposite end of the list, and thinner paychecks tend to shrink the runway when a marriage hits financial strain.
2. Telemarketers — 48.0%. Telemarketers rank second, nearly matching the healthcare category above them. The job pays little, turnover runs high, and hours regularly spill into evenings, since that’s when people actually answer the phone. Commission-heavy sales work also brings income that varies week to week alongside a volume of daily rejection few other jobs require anyone to absorb. None of that alone explains a near-50% rate, but it lines up with a pattern that shows up throughout the dataset: financial instability and marital instability tend to travel together.
3. Massage Therapists — 47.9%. Massage therapists come in third, and the pattern here looks different from telemarketing or healthcare support. Median pay for licensed massage therapists sits in the middle of the national range, so wages alone don’t explain the number. The job’s structure stands out instead: irregular scheduling and a large share of self-employed or contract-based workers who lack the dual steady-paycheck cushion that comes with two salaried jobs. Freelance and contract-heavy occupations cluster toward the high end of the divorce range far more consistently than salaried ones do throughout the wider dataset.
4. Bus Drivers — 47.8%. Bus drivers land fourth, a familiar name in every version of this analysis dating back to the original 2015 dataset. Split shifts start before dawn and stretch into the evening rush, leaving little overlap with a spouse’s waking hours. Overtime is frequent and rarely optional. You end up structurally out of sync with a partner working a standard day, and that mismatch compounds over years in a way no single hard week ever could.
5. Bartenders — 46.8%. Bartenders round out the high end, a rate this year’s data confirms is no fluke: the occupation has appeared near the top of every ACS-based divorce analysis since researchers first ran the numbers. Late nights and weekend shifts sit at the center of it, but the schedule itself does most of the damage. Bartending hours run nearly opposite a conventional workweek, cutting straight into the evenings and weekends most couples depend on to spend time together at all.
The lower end of the list reads almost like a mirror image, dominated by well-paid, credentialed professions with predictable hours.
6. Actuaries — 14.2%. Actuaries hold the lowest rate FlowingData measured, less than a third of the bartending figure. The job pays well, keeps standard business hours, and demands years of exams and credentialing that tend to select for methodical, long-horizon planners, a trait that seems to carry over into how people plan a marriage. Stable income and stable hours aren’t the whole explanation, but they’re clearly doing a lot of the work.
7. Physical Scientists — 17.2%. Physical scientists outside the largest named specialties post the second-lowest rate on the list. Like actuaries, the field requires advanced degrees and offers steady institutional or corporate employment, with little of the overnight or rotating shift work found throughout the high end of the ranking. Money plays a role, but so does structure: a research or lab schedule looks far closer to a spouse’s Monday-through-Friday routine than a bartender’s or a bus driver’s ever will.
8. Software Developers — 18.9%. Software developers post one of the lowest rates of any large occupation category in the country. High pay accounts for part of that, but flexibility matters just as much: remote and hybrid arrangements are common in the field, and hours are self-directed more often than not. The ability to build a schedule around a partner, instead of against one, shows up again and again in the data as a quiet predictor of marital stability.
Line up both ends of the ranking and salary alone doesn’t explain the spread; schedule does more of the work. Nearly every occupation near the bottom of the divorce list keeps hours that overlap heavily with a typical partner’s day, while nearly every occupation near the top runs on nights, weekends, split shifts, or unpredictable overtime. Divorce risk, by this measure, tracks less with how hard a job is and more with how often it keeps two people living on different clocks.
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