Every marriage-to-divorce ratio the U.S. has posted since researchers started tracking it has now been beaten. In 2024, the country recorded 2,390,482 marriages against 986,810 divorces — a ratio of 2.42 marriages for every divorce, according to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University. That’s up from 2.38 in 2023, and it marks the highest point in the 16 years the American Community Survey has measured it. The ratio isn’t a raw marriage count; it’s calculated by dividing women’s marriages by women’s divorces in a given year, which makes it a sharper read on relative momentum than either number alone.
That 2.42 didn’t come out of nowhere, but it also isn’t a straight-line climb. From 2015 through 2021, the ratio held remarkably steady, ranging between 2.10 and 2.16 — roughly two marriages for every divorce, year after year, according to the same NCFMR data. The jump to 2.38 in 2023 and 2.42 in 2024 breaks a six-year plateau, which is part of why researchers are flagging it as the strongest ratio in the survey’s history rather than a routine year-over-year wiggle.
What’s Actually Driving the Shift
Nationally, the shift looks less like a marriage boom and more like a divorce slowdown. The federal government’s own count puts the 2023 marriage rate at 6.1 per 1,000 people and the divorce rate at 2.4 per 1,000, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. The marriage rate has held roughly steady for years while divorce has edged downward. Put the two data sets side by side and the story of 2024 isn’t that more people are getting married. It’s that fewer of the marriages already out there are ending. That distinction matters for how you read a “best ratio in 16 years” headline: it’s less a referendum on romance and more a signal about who’s staying together once they’ve already said yes.
It also means the ratio can climb even in years when the marriage rate itself barely moves, simply because divorces are down. A state doesn’t need a wedding surge to post a strong number; it just needs fewer of its existing marriages ending in a given year, which is exactly the pattern showing up nationally.
How Your State Stacks Up
The national number flattens a wide state-by-state spread. Idaho, Utah, and Kansas post ratios north of 3 marriages for every divorce, while several New England states sit closer to 1.5 — meaning a marriage there is barely more common than a divorce in the same population that year. Here’s where the extremes land, per the same 2024 data from the National Center for Family & Marriage Research:
Highest marriage-to-divorce ratios:
- District of Columbia — 3.77
- Idaho — 3.48
- Utah — 3.21
- Kansas — 3.13
- New Jersey — 3.04
Lowest marriage-to-divorce ratios:
- Delaware — 1.44
- Vermont — 1.50
- Rhode Island — 1.68
- New Hampshire — 1.73
- Mississippi — 1.82
A Regional Divide
Zoom out from individual states and a clear regional pattern appears. In the Midwest and West, roughly 31% to 33% of states landed in the top quartile for their marriage-divorce ratio, according to the same NCFMR analysis. The Northeast split unevenly: only 22% of its states made the top quartile, while a full third fell into the bottom one. The South showed the most lopsided pattern of all: 41% of Southern states clustered in the bottom quartile, with another 29% landing in the third-lowest tier, leaving barely any Southern states among the nation’s strongest ratios.
None of this means a couple in the South is worse off than one in Idaho, or that Delaware residents are abandoning marriage at a higher clip than everyone else. Marriage and divorce ratios move with a state’s median age, cost of living, religious composition, and how many residents were already married before relocating there — not with how seriously any one couple takes their vows. What the geography does show is that “marriage in America” was never a single story to begin with. The healthiest way to read a national record like 2.42 is as an average sitting on top of enormous local variation, one where geography shapes the odds nearly as much as who you marry.
