Half of Marriages End in Divorce — That Number Was a Projection

"Half of all marriages end in divorce" is the most repeated number in the whole subject. It was a projection: researchers in the baby-boom years watched about two percent of that generation divorce each year, carried the rate forward forty years, and landed on half. 1

A second route reached the same figure by dividing one year's marriages by that year's divorces, two entirely different crowds of people. 2 Counted the way demographers count it, the share of Americans who marry and later divorce tops out near forty-one percent, and the Census Bureau's Rose Kreider said in 2005 that she expected no cohort to reach half.

The record since then points the same way. The divorce rate peaked around 1980 at 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women and stood at 14.6 in 2022. 3 The refined divorce rate fell 21 percent between 2008 and 2017, and Philip Cohen's analysis of American Community Survey data describes a country where marriage is getting rarer and more stable. 4 The most recent official figures are 672,502 divorces in 2023 and a rate of 2.4 per 1,000 people. 5

About 70 percent of couples who married in the 1990s reached their fifteenth anniversary, up from roughly 65 percent of those who married in the 1970s and 1980s. 6 The projection was accurate when it was written, which is the part worth keeping. What went wrong is that nobody retired it, and the number is still easy to sell: a news segment ran it as "fifty percent and climbing," and a network promoted a divorce reality show with it. Your odds were always better than a coin flip.