Just 23.4% of America’s married couples now live on a single paycheck, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ newly released Employment Characteristics of Families report covering 2025. Meanwhile, 49.1% of married-couple families had both spouses working, and that figure was actually down slightly from 49.6% the year before, not because single-income households are making a comeback, but because more couples are landing in a third category entirely: neither spouse employed, which climbed to 20.9%. The old assumption that one paycheck could comfortably run a household hasn’t just faded. For most families, it’s structurally gone.
The Numbers Behind a Quiet Shift
BLS tracked 62.64 million married-couple families in 2025, up from 61.48 million the year before, and sorted them by who in the household is working. Both spouses employed: 49.1%. Only one spouse employed: 23.4%. Neither spouse employed, which includes retirees as well as couples where both partners are out of the labor force: 20.9%, itself up from 20.4% in 2024. Add it up, and dual-income households now outnumber single-income households by more than two to one nationally. The single-breadwinner setup that once defined the postwar American household is now a minority arrangement even among couples where someone is working at all.
Where the Shift Shows Up Most: Families With Kids
The pattern sharpens once children enter the picture. Among the 32.9 million married-couple families with children under 18, BLS found that 97.4% had at least one parent employed, but the split between one- and two-income households tells the real story. In 66.3% of those families, both parents were working. Only 31.2% relied on a single employed parent. That’s a nearly two-to-one ratio favoring dual-income households, in the exact demographic, married parents raising kids, where the single-breadwinner model was once considered the norm rather than the exception.
Even Young Kids Don’t Keep Both Parents Home
One place you might expect the old model to hold on is with very young children, when child care costs and logistics are hardest. It does hold on more there, but not by much. Among married-couple families with kids under age 6, 62.2% had both parents employed, per the BLS data. That’s lower than the 69.3% dual-employment rate among families with kids ages 6 to 17, but it’s still well above 60%, meaning even the households most likely to consider one parent staying home are, more often than not, running on two incomes anyway.
What Changed Isn’t a Mystery, but the Scale Is
None of this is a new trend exactly. Dual-income households have been rising for decades as more women entered and stayed in the workforce, as the cost of housing, child care and everyday goods climbed, and as one salary simply stopped stretching as far as it used to. What this year’s BLS data makes clear is how far along that shift has gone. Single-income marriage isn’t a fading trend anymore. Among families with children, it now describes fewer than one in three households, and nationally it barely edges out one in four married couples overall.
Why “Neither Employed” Is Growing Too
The category that actually grew year over year wasn’t single-income households. It was households where neither spouse works, up to 20.9% from 20.4%. That group includes retirees, a demographic that’s expanding as the population ages, along with couples navigating disability, caregiving or a period out of the labor force. It’s a reminder that the story here isn’t simply “more people are working.” It’s that the households still earning a paycheck are overwhelmingly earning two of them, while a separate, growing slice of married couples sits outside the workforce altogether. The middle ground, one working spouse and one not, is the piece that keeps shrinking.
The New Default
For a long stretch of American history, a household running on one income was the assumption baked into everything from mortgage lending to sitcom plots. The BLS numbers for 2025 confirm what a lot of working couples already feel in their weekly schedules: that assumption now describes a shrinking minority. Two incomes aren’t a modern convenience layered on top of the old model anymore. For most married couples, especially those raising kids, two incomes are simply what running a household requires, and the federal data now makes that shift impossible to argue with.
