Marriage and Divorce Statistics

We get a lot of questions on marriages and divorces. Unfortunately we are unable to answer very many of them.

 On December 15, 1995 the National Center for Health Statistics filed a notice in the Federal Register of its intent to stop collecting detailed information on marriages and divorces from state governments through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program.

As a result, the last comprehensive data on marriages and divorces covers the period 1989-1990 (downloads available at links).

Currently data are available on the total number of marriages performed in the United States and each state. We provide a divorce rate for the nation and the number of divorces and annulments recorded in those states which report their data to us. California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana, and Minnesota do not report divorce data.

At these links are marriage and divorce data from 1920 through November 2006. Newer data are reported in publications of our National Vital Statistics Reports and can be found here.