The divorce rate in the United States has declined since it reached its peak in 1980, dropping just over 36% in the more than four decades since its summit.
The new analysis from the Pew Research Center shows the refined divorce rate, which studies divorces per 1,000 married women over age 15, dropped to 14.4 in 2023. At its peak in 1980, the rate was 22.6. In 2008, it sat at 20.5, meaning it has dropped by a sharper margin in recent years.
The decline in divorces is due to the increased likelihood of college-educated people getting married, Jake Hays, a social and demographic research associate for Pew Research Center, wrote in the analysis.
“Over time, the married population has shifted toward adults with higher levels of education as people with lower levels of education have become less likely to marry,” Hays wrote, pointing to an Axios piece showing the fall in marriage rates among non-college-educated women. “Adults with more education are less likely to divorce, and these shifts have driven down the divorce rate.”
Philip N. Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland with a focus on family trends, wrote about the same trend in his 2019 article “The Coming Divorce Decline.”
“Higher education, older age at marriage, lower-order marriage all reduce the odds of divorce,” Cohen wrote, concluding that “it appears certain” divorce rates will continue to decline.
Based on census data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the conservative think tank Institute for Family Studies estimated in March that 40% of modern-day marriages will end in divorce, contrasting the colloquialism that half of all marriages end in divorce.
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The Pew analysis showed that the divorce rate among one sector of American society does not look as optimistic. Divorces between U.S. adults over the age of 65 have followed a contrary trend to the refined divorce rate.
Often called the “grey divorce” rate, divorce among the older population has increased from 3.9 of every 1,000 women in 1990 to 10.3 in 2023. The rate peaked at 11 in 2008 and has remained steady since then.
