Divorce Statistics UK 2023

Over the past 50 years, one third of marriages have ended in divorce. We've analysed Office for National statistics data to find out how divorce rates have changed over the past 20 years and how they vary by age group. Read on to find out the average age of men and women when they get divorced, and the worst years to have gotten married according to divorce stats. To read about how much a divorce will cost, see our article on the average cost of a divorce.

• What proportion of marriages end in divorce?
• Worst marriage years for divorces?
• How many divorces are there each year?
• How have divorce rates changed for young people?
• How old are men and women when they get divorced?
• Why do couples get divorced?
• Household wealth stats after divorce

Divorce Rate

The average overall divorce rate in England and Wales is 34.2%, based on all marriages over the past 50+ years between 1964 to 2022. However, the rate changes according to how many years a couple has been together, and even the year they married.

For example, of couples who married 50 years ago in 1972, 35.2% had ended in divorce by 2022. In contrast, 43.0% of those marrying in 1972 had divorced by 2022. And 17.5% of couples married in 2012 had divorced within the first ten years by 2022. (This is down from 20% a few years ago, indicating that younger couples seem to be more likely to stay together now.)

Worst Marriage Years for Divorces?

Interestingly, some marriage years have worse divorce stats than other years. For example, 1987 has the highest cumulative divorce rate—of couples married in 1987, 45% have since ended in divorce.

Marriages in 1987 have the highest cumulative divorce rate

So, couples who tied the knot in 1987 have the highest cumulative divorce rate SO FAR, with 45% of these marriages ending in divorce by 2022.

However it's not a surprise that the cumulative divorce rate is lower for more recent marriage years (since 1987), as they've had fewer years of accumulated divorces. Since the cumulative rate so far has peaked for those married in 1987, it's safe to say that the worst year to get married was 1987—if you married before 1988.

Could more recent marriages be on track to be worse than 1987? Our experts think it's a possibility.

Another way to measure the worst years for marriages is charting the data for each marriage year, showing each marriage year's cumulative divorce rate over time. That would be a lot of lines on a chart to look at (one line per marriage year) so for easier viewing we grouped marriage years into 5-year buckets for a cohort analysis (e.g. married between 1986 and 1990, etc.).

As you can see in the chart below, the cohort including 1987 (the suspected worst marriage year so far) is in fact a higher divorce rate bucket (1986-1990, the red line in the chart below), but it looks like 1991-1995 (orange line) is on track to be even worse with higher cumulative divorce rates—just give it more time.

More recent cohort, such as 2011-2015 and 2016-2020, are tracking better with much lower divorce rates so far at each wedding anniversary. For example, those married in 1992 were more than twice as likely to divorce by their 5th wedding anniversary as those married in 2014.

Marriages in more recent years have noticeably lower divorce rates

Changing Divorce Rates

The divorce rate has certainly changed over the years, especially for longer marriages. The chart below shows how divorce rates for those married 10, 20 and 30 years has changed over the past 30 years. As you can see, there's been an improvement in the proportion of marriages failing by 10 years (now below 20%), but interestingly there's a much higher proportion of marriages failing by 30 years (30.6% in 1998 vs. 43.6% in 2020)—probably this reflects a changing society, with views on divorce changing.

Divorce rates over the past 25 years

Number of Divorces

In 2022, there were 80,057 divorces in England and Wales—78,759 were opposite-sex divorces and 1,298 were of same-sex couples. This is a decrease of 51.5% since 1993, the year with the largest number of divorces, when a whopping 165,018 marriages ended by divorce.

Note: the figure for 2022 could be abnormally low because the Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 introduced a minimum period of 20 weeks between the start of proceedings and application for final order. The ONS says this may have had an impact on the number and timing of divorces taking place from April 2022.

The number of couples getting divorced is steadily declining

However, that's not the whole story. While the number of divorces has been steadily dropping, so has the number of couples getting married. So fewer divorces doesn't necessarily mean that couples are getting better at staying together. The year with the highest number of marriages was 1972, when 426,241 couples said, "I do." By 2019, that number had dropped to 219,850—a decrease of 48%. (2020 was even lower, at just 85,770 marriages, but we view that as a data blip due to the pandemic.)

The number of couples getting divorced is declining, but so is the number of marriages

Divorce Rates by Age

Divorce rates for young people in particular have dropped since 1993, the year with the highest number of divorces in England and Wales. Around 3% of couples under the age of 35 ended in divorce during 1993—in the year 2019 this number had dropped to around 1%.

The divorce rate for young people in particular has dropped over the past 25 years

Number of Divorces by Age

The average age for divorce is 46.4 for men and 43.9 for women. Similarly, those age 45 to 49 years old have the most divorces.

The number of couples getting divorced is steadily declining

Divorces by Previously Divorced People

A look at opposite-sex divorces shows that in 2019, 7 in 10 divorces were among couples where neither party was previously divorced. In around 1 in 4 divorces, either the man or woman had divorced before. And in 6% of divorces, both people had previously divorced.

Causes of Divorce

Unreasonable behaviour is the most common cause of divorce in England and Wales, accounting for nearly half of all divorces. In 2022, 47.1% of divorces were caused by unreasonable behaviour. The second most common reason that couples divorce is after a 2 year separation with consent (28.1% of divorces). Adultery was the cause of 7.5% of divorces, which is a few percentage points lower than a few years ago.

Most divorces result from unreasonable behaviour

Household Wealth After Divorce

Of course, when one household splits into two households after a divorce and assets have been divided somehow, the two new divorced households each have less wealth than the combined married household did. No surprise then that divorced households are more likely to have less money, and less likely to have more money. But what do the stats really look like?

We dug into data from the Wealth and Assets Survey (ONS) to find out. On the lower side of wealth, we found that only 12% of married households have less than £85,000 of total household wealth, but 36.5% of divorced households are in this lower wealth band. In contrast, 50.5% of married households have more than £500,000 of total wealth, but only 26.5% of divorced households have this much.

Wealth of Men vs Women After Divorce

While divorces in the UK typically aim for a 50/50 split, the data shows that divorced men generally have more wealth than divorced women. This could be due to a number of factors, from pensions not being included in divorce assets to the fact that men might earn more after the divorce than women. Women are more likely to have taken a career break or work part time in order to care for children, which not only affects their pension savings during the marriage but also impacts the ability to earn at the same rate as their husbands after the divorce.

As you can see in the table and chart below, divorced women have less wealth overall than divorced men. The table shows the median wealth for divorced people—the 'median' represents the midpoint, that is, half of people have less and half of people have more. The median wealth for divorced women is somewhere between £85,000 and £200,000. The median wealth for divorced men is between £200,000 and £300,000.

The final chart below provides a bit more insight into these figures. As you can see circled in red, divorced woman are noticeably more likely to have wealth in the £20,000 to £85,000 range. In contrast, divorced men are noticeably more likely to have wealth of £1 million or more.

Note: Some data tables were not released with the 2022 data set released by the ONS in 2024, so for those sections we are still using 2019 data.