Publishers currently cited

  • Pew Research Center (2023)Pew Research Center analysis of American Community Survey marital-history data. Published Oct 16, 2025.
  • U.S. Census Bureau (2022)American Community Survey 1-year estimates; divorces in the past 12 months per 1,000 women aged 15+. 2020 excluded due to pandemic data collection issues. Story published October 2024.

Every approved figure, with the exact population it describes and the date it was last checked, is listed on the numbers page — last verified .

What we refused to print

These claims circulate widely in writing about divorce. None of them could be traced to a primary source we could read, so none of them appears anywhere on this site.

  • Half of all marriages end in divorce / the divorce rate is 50%.Folklore. No primary source states this. It is a 1970s-era projection, not a measurement. What the data actually says: Pew Research Center (2023 ACS) finds one-third of ever-married Americans say their first marriage ended in divorce, and the refined divorce rate has fallen from 22.6 per 1,000 married women around 1980 to 14.4 in 2023. Writers must use the approved figures instead.
  • The U.S. crude divorce rate is about 2.3–2.4 divorces per 1,000 total population (CDC/NCHS).Could not be verified. cdc.gov returned HTTP 403 to automated fetch on both the FastStats Marriage and Divorce page and the NVSS national rates PDF, so the figure was never read on the primary source. Also excludes several non-reporting states. Use the Census Bureau or Pew rates that were verified instead.
  • A count of how many U.S. adults are currently divorced (e.g. 'X million divorced Americans').Attempted via Census ACS table B12001; data.census.gov is not fetchable as a static page and no Census narrative page carrying the count was verified within budget. Rephrase without a number, or use the approved 'one-third of ever-married Americans' figure.
  • Gray divorce has doubled/tripled since 1990; nearly 40% of all people divorcing today are aged 50 or older (BGSU/NCFMR).Appeared only in search-engine snippets of BGSU/NCFMR pages; the specific numbers were not confirmed on the primary page when fetched (FP-24-22 discusses the trend but publishes no per-1,000 rate, and the FP-25-24 PDF could not be parsed reliably). Use the approved Pew 3.9 → 10.3 gray divorce figures, which state the same trend with verified numbers.
  • Any statistic about dating after divorce — how long divorced people wait to date, online-dating usage, app demographics, success rates.Explicitly out of scope for this run and unverified. No such number is approved; any draft containing one fails the gate.

The rules

  1. The publisher is named in the same sentence as the number, with the year.
  2. We link the origin, not an article about the origin.
  3. The population is stated: a rate per 1,000 married women is not a rate per 1,000 women.
  4. Unverifiable means unpublished. There is no rounding, no "roughly", no "studies show".

Never cited as fact

  • Figures quoted by another site without an origin.
  • Surveys run by a company selling the thing the survey measures.
  • Anything phrased as “studies show” with no study named.