Divorce Statistics (2026)

The US divorce rate was 2.4 per 1,000 population in 2023, down from 4.0 in 2000. In absolute terms that is 672,502 divorces and annulments against 944,000 at the start of the series.

The decline is steady rather than event-driven. The rate fell through the 2000s, through the 2010s and through the pandemic, with only a small 2021 uptick as courts cleared the backlog created by 2020 closures.

That makes it one of the more reliable long trends in American demographic data, and it contradicts the widely repeated claim that half of marriages end in divorce.

The marriage rate fell over the same period, from 8.2 per 1,000 in 2000 to 6.1 in 2023.

Some of the divorce decline is therefore arithmetic: a smaller married population produces fewer divorces even if the risk of any given marriage ending were unchanged.

The rest is behavioural. People marry later than they used to, and later marriage is associated with lower dissolution rates, so both the numerator and the denominator have moved in the same direction.

This is the single most common error made with this dataset, and it comes straight from the source table's footnotes.

The 2023 marriage figure covers the whole country and is calculated on a population of 334,914,895. The 2023 divorce figure covers 45 reporting states plus the District of Columbia and is calculated on a population of 279,800,079, because California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota and New Mexico do not report.

Dividing 672,502 by 2,041,926 to get a divorce ratio is therefore meaningless, because the two numbers describe different populations. The excluded set has changed over the years too, which is why the CDC labels the whole series provisional.

If a marriage lasted at least 10 years, a divorced spouse aged 62 or older and unmarried can claim Social Security on their ex-spouse's record.

What they receive does not reduce the ex-spouse's benefit or the benefit of the ex-spouse's current spouse. This is not a shared pot.

The former spouse can claim even if the ex has not started taking retirement benefits, provided both are at least 62 and they have been divorced at least two continuous years.

There is no partial credit. A marriage of nine years and eleven months confers nothing, and a marriage of ten years and one day confers the full entitlement for life.

That makes the duration of the marriage a genuinely financial fact when a separation is happening close to the boundary, and it is worth knowing before the date of the decree is set rather than after.

The surviving divorced spouse rules use the same ten-year threshold, with eligibility from age 60.

For agreements executed before 2019, alimony was deductible by the payer and taxable to the recipient. That is still true for those older agreements.

For any agreement executed after 2018, the payer cannot deduct it and the recipient does not include it in gross income.

The trap sits in the middle: a pre-2019 agreement that is later modified moves to the new treatment only if the modification expressly says the repeal applies. Modifying an old agreement without addressing that point leaves the old treatment in place, which may or may not be what either party intended.

Under the old rules, alimony moved income from a higher tax bracket to a lower one, so the household as a whole paid less tax and there was more money to divide.

That subsidy is gone for post-2018 agreements. The same transfer now costs more in total tax, which changes what a fair settlement number looks like.

Anyone comparing their settlement to a friend's from 2017 is comparing two different tax regimes, and the older number will look more generous than it is.

Child support is never deductible by the payer and is never income to the recipient, regardless of when the agreement was executed.

The ordering rule is the part that catches people. If an instrument provides for both alimony and child support and the payer pays less than the total required, the payments apply to child support first, and only the remainder counts as alimony.

For a pre-2019 agreement where alimony is still deductible, an underpayment therefore reduces the deductible portion first, which is the opposite of the intuitive assumption.

The IRS excludes noncash property settlements whether paid in a lump sum or in instalments, payments representing a spouse's part of community property income, payments to maintain the payer's property, use of the payer's property, and voluntary payments not required by the divorce instrument.

It also requires that the payment stop on the death of the recipient. A payment obligation that survives the recipient's death is not alimony, however it is labelled in the agreement.

These are definitional rules rather than judgement calls, so labelling something alimony in a settlement does not make it alimony for tax purposes.

A workplace retirement plan cannot simply be divided by agreement. It generally requires a qualified domestic relations order, a specific court order directed at the plan administrator.

Without one, a withdrawal to pay a settlement is an ordinary distribution: taxable to the account holder and potentially subject to the early withdrawal penalty, on money that was supposed to reach the other spouse in full.

IRAs work differently again, transferring under the divorce instrument rather than by a domestic relations order, which is why the same settlement can require two different mechanisms.

A dollar in a Roth account and a dollar in a traditional account are not worth the same amount, because one has already been taxed and the other has not.

Splitting accounts down the middle by balance therefore divides them unequally by value, and the gap widens the higher the recipient's eventual tax rate.

The same problem applies to a house with a low cost basis against cash of identical market value, since one carries an embedded capital gain and the other does not.

Marriage and divorce counts and rates are from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics, provisional figures from the National Vital Statistics System covering 2000 to 2023.

The Social Security rules are from SSA Publication EN-05-10035, Retirement Benefits, and EN-05-10084, Survivors Benefits.

The tax treatment is from IRS Topic no. 452, Alimony and separate maintenance. Divorce law is state law and this page is not legal advice; the figures are federal and the rest is not.