Every year, the national marriage rate gets reported as a single declining line on a chart, treated as proof that marriage is fading out everywhere at once. New state-level data from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University tells a more complicated story.
In its Refined Marriage Rate in the U.S.: Geographic Variation, 2024 report, the national refined marriage rate held steady at 31.2 per 1,000 unmarried women, representing roughly 2.39 million women who married that year. But that national average hides swings of more than double between the states at the top and bottom of the list.
The refined marriage rate itself is a more precise measure than the crude marriage rate most headlines cite, it’s calculated as the number of women who married in the past 12 months per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15 and older, which the researchers note is a better tool than a crude rate when states differ significantly in age composition and sex ratios. And once you look at the state-by-state breakdown, the “marriage is declining everywhere” narrative doesn’t hold up nearly as cleanly.
Where marriage rates are highest
Utah leads the country by a wide margin, with a refined marriage rate of 51.7 per 1,000 unmarried women, nearly two-and-a-half times the rate in the lowest-ranked states. Idaho follows at 44.3, Colorado at 43.0, Wyoming at 42.9 and South Dakota at 41.4. Every one of those states sits well above the 31.2 national figure, and the pattern isn’t random geography, it clusters in the Mountain West and parts of the Midwest, where median ages skew younger and religious affiliation, particularly in Utah and Idaho, tends to run higher than the national average.
Regionally, the NCFMR data shows 69% of Western states posting above-average rates, with 38% landing in the top quartile nationally. The Midwest wasn’t far behind, with 42% of its states in the top quartile, actually the highest regional concentration in that top bracket of any region measured.
Where marriage rates are lowest
The bottom of the list looks almost like a different country’s data. Rhode Island posted a refined marriage rate of 24.3, Connecticut 23.8, New Mexico 21.6, Louisiana 21.2, and Delaware came in lowest nationally at 20.1, less than half of Utah’s rate. The Northeast dominates this end of the ranking, with 78% of its states falling into the bottom quartile nationally and not a single Northeastern state appearing in either of the top two quartiles.
- National refined marriage rate: 31.2 per 1,000 unmarried women in 2024
- Highest: Utah (51.7), Idaho (44.3), Colorado (43.0), Wyoming (42.9), South Dakota (41.4)
- Lowest: Rhode Island (24.3), Connecticut (23.8), New Mexico (21.6), Louisiana (21.2), Delaware (20.1)
Why the gap is so wide
The report’s regional breakdown lines up with factors that demographers have documented for years even outside this particular dataset: cost of living, religious practice, and the age structure of a state’s population all shape how early and how often people marry. States like Utah and Idaho combine younger median ages with high rates of religious affiliation and comparatively lower housing costs relative to income, all of which tend to push marriage rates upward. Meanwhile, states like Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware carry some of the highest costs of living in the country alongside older, more secular populations, conditions that have consistently correlated with people marrying later or not at all.
That’s the piece that gets lost when marriage rates get reduced to a single national number. A retiree-heavy, high-cost-of-living state in the Northeast and a younger, lower-cost state in the Mountain West aren’t experiencing the same trend at all, one is watching marriage decline sharply, the other is watching it stay comparatively strong. Averaging those two realities into one number doesn’t just oversimplify the story. It actively hides which parts of the country are driving the decline and which parts aren’t declining much at all.
The real story in this data isn’t that marriage is disappearing nationally, it’s that where you live may say more about your odds of getting married this year than any national trend line ever could.
