Commonness of Divorce in America

I wondered how common it is for someone to get a divorce. While I’ve touched on the topic before, I’ve never calculated it directly, so I gave it a go.

I looked at five years of American Community Survey data from 2016 to 2020. If married before, participants were asked the year of their most recent marriage. Even though I was curious about divorce, for some reason my first thought was to calculate the percentage of people who were still married, given the year they married.

Still Married

The more recent someone married, the higher the likelihood they’re still married — as expected — which only gives us a glimpse of divorce rates.

Those who are not still married doesn’t mean they’re divorced though. They might be widowed or just separated. The ACS provides five statuses for those who have been married: married with spouse present, married with spouse absent, separated, divorced, and widowed. Here’s the distribution of those statuses, again by year of marriage.

Marital Status

It helps to see marital statuses by year of marriage, as divorce is only one part of a distribution. For earlier marriages, it’s much more common to be widowed and divorced, which makes sense when you consider life expectancy.

While interesting, it still didn’t answer the original question of how common divorce is. Going by year of marriage was only partially useful, because it only covered the most recent marriage. People who were married at the time of the survey but divorced previously weren’t counted.

So I counted people who were either divorced or married more than one time and divided by the number of people who married at least once. Then I charted by age.

Divorce Rate by Age

Maybe it is more useful to look at divorce by age instead of of year of marriage.

Out of people who married at least once, the percentage of people who were married more than once or divorced approaches 50 percent as you get to age 60. But mortality appears to take precedence after that.

I was kind of surprised by how volatile the teenage marriages seem to be, and I thought the rate for 20s and 30s would be lower than came out. Then again, we’re only looking at the people who were married. There’s a lot of people who have never married at that age and people are marrying later. So maybe not so surprising.

In any case, divorce I guess is pretty common no matter what angle you look from.

Notes

The estimates are based on 2016-2020 American Community Survey microdata, which I downloaded from IPUMS. I analyzed, compiled, and visualized the data with R.