Most pages offering divorce statistics by age give you a tidy table with a row for every decade and no indication of where any of it came from. This one is smaller and states its sources, because the tidy version does not exist in the primary data — and the reason it does not exist is more useful than the table would have been.
Every figure below was read on the publisher’s own page. Each row states exactly who the figure describes, which is the part that gets lost first and causes the most damage.
The figures
| Figure | Exactly who it describes | Publisher | Data year | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10.3 divorces per 1,000, up from 3.9 in 1990 | Married women aged 50 and older in the US. Not a share of all divorces, and not all adults over 50. | Pew Research Center | 2023 | |
| 14.4 divorces per 1,000, down from 22.6 around 1980 | Married women aged 15 and older in the US — the “refined” rate, denominator is married women only. | Pew Research Center | 2023 | |
| 7.1 per 1,000, down from 9.8 in 2012 | All women aged 15 and older in the US — married and unmarried alike are in the denominator. | U.S. Census Bureau | 2022 | |
| One-third said their first marriage ended in divorce | US adults who have ever been married. Not all adults, and not a lifetime probability for a marriage entered today. | Pew Research Center | 2023 | |
| About two-thirds have remarried | US adults who have ever divorced — cumulative over a lifetime, not an annual rate. | Pew Research Center | 2023 | |
| 68% of men, 64% of women have remarried | US adults who have ever divorced, split by sex. | Pew Research Center | 2023 |
The same table, with the link to each source and the method behind it, is on the numbers page.
The denominator problem, which is most of the problem
Three numbers above look like they belong in one column and do not.
Pew Research Center reports 14.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2023, down from a peak of 22.6 around 1980. That is a refined rate: the denominator is married women, so it answers the question “of the people who could get divorced, how many did?”
Separately, the U.S. Census Bureau reports the national divorce rate fell from 9.8 per 1,000 women aged 15 and older in 2012 to 7.1 in 2022. That denominator is all women — married, single, widowed. It answers a different question, and it is smaller for arithmetic reasons rather than because divorce is rarer than Pew found.
Putting those two in one column, or subtracting one from the other, produces a comparison that does not exist. A very large amount of the divorce-statistics content online does exactly that, which is why two sites can quote the same year and appear to disagree.
The one age comparison the data actually supports
Within the refined rate — married women, same denominator — the direction splits by age, and this is the finding worth taking away.
Overall, divorce is becoming less common: Pew Research Center reports the rate fell from 22.6 per 1,000 married women around 1980 to 14.4 in 2023.
Among older couples it went the other way: Pew Research Center reports the rate among married women aged 50 and older rose from 3.9 per 1,000 in 1990 to 10.3 per 1,000 in 2023, having peaked at 11.0 in 2008. So the over-50 rate has risen while the national one fell, and the distance between the two has narrowed considerably.
10.3 per 1,000
Pew Research Center's refined divorce rate for married women aged fifty and older in the United States has risen, while the same rate for married women of every age has fallen.
Who these figures describe
- Married women aged 50 and older in the United States.
Source: Pew Research Center, 2023. See how we check numbers.
Show these numbers as a table
| Group | Value | Who it describes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Married women 50 and older in the United States | 10.3 per 1,000 | Married women aged 50 and older in the United States. | Pew Research Center, 2023 |
That is the whole of the verified age story. It is two lines, not ten, and it is real.
What is missing from this page, and why
A statistics page that admits its gaps is worth more than one that quietly fills them, so here are the gaps.
No decade-by-decade table. There is no per-band rate here for people in their twenties, thirties or forties, because we could not read one on a primary source. The over-50 series is published; a full ladder is not, at least not in a form we verified.
No CDC figure. The commonly quoted crude rate of roughly two-point-something divorces per 1,000 total population comes from CDC/NCHS. Their pages returned an automated-access error when fetched, so the number was never read at the source. It also excludes several non-reporting states. It is left out rather than copied from a secondary site.
No national headcount. No “X million divorced Americans” appears here. The Census table that would answer it is not fetchable as a static page, and no narrative page carrying the count was verified.
No “share of all divorces” for the over-50s. The widely repeated claim that a large fraction of everyone divorcing today is over 50 could not be confirmed on the primary page it is attributed to. The Pew rates above describe the same trend with numbers we read ourselves.
No dating statistics. How long people wait before dating again, app usage, success rates: none of it was verifiable and none of it appears anywhere on this site.
How to use a figure from this page
Take the population with the number. “10.3 per 1,000” on its own is not a fact; “10.3 divorces per 1,000 married women aged 50 and older, Pew Research Center, 2023” is. Any figure here can be quoted with attribution and a link, and the source link itself is one click away on the numbers page — going to the publisher is always better than citing us.
If a figure on this page has gone stale or the source has changed, our corrections process is the fastest way to get it fixed.
Related reading
Divorce after 50 is what the over-50 trend looks like from inside it. Life after divorce for women covers the first year where the practical costs land unevenly, and how long to wait to date after divorce is the page that most often gets a fabricated statistic attached to it elsewhere.
Also asked
What is the divorce rate in the United States?
It depends which rate you mean, and the two most-cited ones are not interchangeable. Pew Research Center reports 14.4 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2023. The U.S. Census Bureau reports 7.1 per 1,000 women aged 15 and older in 2022. The first counts only married women in the denominator; the second counts all women.
Do half of all marriages end in divorce?
No primary source states that, and this site treats it as folklore. It is a projection from the 1970s that outlived its own assumptions. What is measured: Pew Research Center found that in 2023, one-third of Americans who had ever been married said their first marriage ended in divorce.
Is divorce after 50 increasing?
Yes, and it runs against the overall direction. Pew Research Center reports the rate among married women aged 50 and older rose from 3.9 per 1,000 in 1990 to 10.3 per 1,000 in 2023, and that the same group's rate peaked at 11.0 in 2008.
How many divorced people are there in the United States?
This page does not carry that number. We attempted to source a national count of currently-divorced adults and could not verify one on a primary page within the budget for this build, so no figure is printed. A count you find elsewhere may well be correct; it is simply not one we have checked.
Why is there no CDC divorce rate on this page?
Because we never read it. The CDC pages carrying the crude marriage and divorce rates returned an automated-access error when fetched, so the figure could not be confirmed on the primary source. It also excludes several non-reporting states. We use the Census Bureau and Pew figures that were verified instead.