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Only 51% of American adults are currently married. In 1960, that number was 72%. Somewhere between those two figures, marriage stopped being the default American adulthood, and the data shows no sign of the trend reversing.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The national marriage rate — the crude measure of how many marriages occur per 1,000 people — sat at 6.1 in 2023, the most recent year with finalized data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. That is less than half the postwar peak of 16.4 recorded in 1946, and well below the 8.5 rate the country carried through 1960. The decline has not been a sudden collapse. It has been a slow, four-decade slide that has simply never found a floor.
A Generation Reaching 40 Without Marrying
The starkest evidence isn’t in the yearly rate — it’s in what happens to a single cohort over time. According to Pew Research Center’s analysis of Census Bureau data, 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married as of 2021. In 1980, that figure was just 6%. In 2010, it was 20%. Each decade has pushed the number higher, and there is no comparable point in over a century of Census records — the previous high, in 1910, was 16%.
The gap widens further along lines of education. Among 40-year-olds with a high school diploma or less, one-third have never married. Among those with a bachelor’s degree, it’s 18%. Marriage, once close to a universal life stage, is increasingly something that tracks with income and credentials.
A quarter of Americans now reach 40 having never married at all — a level this country hasn’t seen in over a hundred years of record-keeping.
Delay, Not Just Decline
Part of the story is timing rather than abandonment. The median age at first marriage hit a record 30.2 for men and 28.6 for women in 2024, according to Census Bureau figures — years later than a generation ago. Pew’s research also notes that roughly a quarter of 40-year-olds who hadn’t married by 2001 went on to marry by age 60, meaning some share of today’s never-married 40-year-olds will eventually marry too. But the decades-long direction of the trend — later, less frequent, less central to adult life — hasn’t reversed even as marriages have ticked up slightly off pandemic-era lows.
What’s Replacing the Institution
Births outside marriage tell the other half of the story. In the most recent finalized CDC data, 39.5% of all U.S. births were to unmarried women, with a fertility rate of 35.5 births per 1,000 unmarried women ages 15–44, according to the CDC’s 2024 natality report. Family formation hasn’t disappeared — nearly four in ten American children are now born into households where marriage was never part of the equation, and cohabitation without marriage has become a common, semi-permanent stop along the way. Among never-married 40- to 44-year-olds, 22% were living with a romantic partner as of 2022.
What This Means for the Index
Marriage has historically functioned as one of the more durable threads of social infrastructure — a legal, economic, and communal commitment that tends to correlate with stability across a range of other measures. Its retreat doesn’t automatically mean family life is collapsing; cohabitation and unmarried parenting are real, often stable arrangements. But the erosion of a shared institution that once organized a huge share of adult life, replaced by a patchwork of looser and less legally binding arrangements, is exactly the kind of structural shift the Index exists to track. When a quarter of a generation reaches 40 without ever marrying — a rate unmatched in over a century — that’s not a lifestyle footnote. It’s a fundamental change in how Americans build households, and the data says it’s still accelerating, not stabilizing.
Friday August 21st 2026
— David, The Moral Decay Index