What percentage of people never get married

The following table shows the percent of men and women in the United States ages 20 to 44 who never married from 1970 to 2010.

Age	1970	1999	2000	2002	2004	2008	2010
Male:
20 to 24 years	35.8%	83.2%	83.7%	85.4%	86.7%	86.9%	88.7%
25 to 29 years	10.5	52.1	51.7	53.7	56.6	57.6	62.2
30 to 34 years	6.2	30.7	30.0	34.0	33.4	32.4	36.5
35 to 39 years	5.4	21.1	20.3	21.1	23.4	23.0	23.5
40 to 44 years	4.9	15.8	15.7	16.7	18.5	16.9	20.4
Female:
20 to 24 years	54.7%	72.3%	72.8%	74.0%	75.4%	76.4%	79.3%
25 to 29 years	19.1	38.9	38.9	40.4	40.8	43.4	47.8
30 to 34 years	9.4	22.1	21.9	23.0	23.7	24.0	27.2
35 to 39 years	7.2	15.2	14.3	14.7	14.6	15.2	17.7
40 to 44 years	6.3	10.9	11.8	11.5	12.2	12.9	13.8

NOTE: Data apply to the U.S.

Source:U.S. Bureau of the Census.

Median Age at First Marriage, 1890–2010 Marital Status Marital Status of the Population by Sex, 1900-2010

Show captionNewlyweds cutting a cake. About one in eight people are living together as a couple but are not married. Photograph: Image Source/Corbis

Marriage

ONS figures show just over half of adults are married, compared with 90% of 60-year-olds – but divorce rates are also highest among older couples

Are all the good ones really married? Not according to new data that shows that more people in England and Wales have never wed than at any time since records began.

In 2014 more than a third of people (33.9%) were not or had never been married, an increase of three percentage points on 10 years ago, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Just met? On TV? Stick it out for five weeks? Baby, I think I wanna marry you

About one in eight people were living together as a couple but were not married. More men (28%) than women (22%) lived alone and had never married.

Just over half the population (51.2%) were married, a fall from 53.8% 10 years ago. The number of married people rose 700,000 in the last three years but an increase in the overall UK population means the percentage dropped.

Harry Benson, research director of Marriage Foundation, a thinktank that promotes marriage, said: “On our own current estimates, 90% of 60-year-olds have married at some stage, whereas only 50% of today’s young adults will do so. If we want more of our young two-parent families to succeed as couples, the older generation have got a lot of encouraging to do.”

But the figures also showed divorce rates were highest among older couples. More people aged 50-64 were divorcing than younger age groups.

The number of divorcees was close to its 2011 peak, with 8.2% of the population having dissolved marriages or civil partnerships.

Despite a drop in the proportion of people in civil partnerships – down 0.2% year-on-year, attributed to same-sex couples now opting for marriage – some campaigners are convinced civil partnerships for opposite-sex couples would be a way to give legal protection to partners who are wary of traditional marriage.

Ava Lee, the group’s campaigns manager, said comparable legislation in other countries had led to an uptake in cohabiting couples opting for legal protection via civil partnership equivalents, and had not had any effect on the numbers choosing traditional marriage.

For some couples, Lee said, marriage was “an institution that they do not feel comfortable with being a part of”.

She said: “Preventing these couples from accessing civil partnerships denies protections under the law: no rights to ownership of each other’s property, no rights to inherit the other’s estate, and no rights to tax benefits provided to married couples. There is no real justification for upholding this strange anomaly in the law and stopping opposite-sex couples from forming civil partnerships.”

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