In the United States, the share of adults who are currently married fell from 63.9 percent in 1950 to 51.3 percent in 2000, while the share who had never married rose from 21.1 percent to 27.1 percent over the same fifty years. That single national data series captures, in miniature, a shift playing out across most of the world’s wealthier countries: fewer adults currently married at any given time, more adults who have never married, and a marital status distribution that looks meaningfully different from the one their grandparents’ generation experienced.
Marital status is measured consistently enough across countries, through the United Nations World Marriage Data project, covering marital status by age and sex for 232 countries or areas since around 1950, that meaningful comparison is possible. What that comparison shows is not a single global story but several regional ones moving at different speeds.
How the World Measures Marital Status
Demographers classify the adult population into four core marital status categories: never married, currently married, divorced and widowed. The United Nations World Marriage Data 2019 database tracks four key indicators built on these categories: the full distribution of the population by marital status, the proportion currently married, the proportion ever married and the singulate mean age at marriage, a statistical estimate of the average age at first marriage derived from the proportions single at each age.
An important definitional trap sits inside the “single” category as commonly used in casual speech. Statistically, “never married” refers only to people who have not yet married at all; a divorced or widowed person is not “single” in this technical sense, even though they may describe themselves that way informally. Reports and datasets that blur this distinction, treating “single” as equivalent to “not currently married,” conflate people in very different life circumstances and at very different points in the life course.
The Global Marital Status Picture
A clean, universally comparable global percentage breakdown across all four categories is harder to produce than it might seem, because national surveys and censuses use different age cutoffs, different treatments of cohabiting couples, and different reference years. What is well established, from Our World in Data’s analysis of UN figures, is that the share of women married or in a union worldwide has stayed remarkably stable in stock terms, falling only from 69 percent in 1970 to 64 percent in 2024, even as annual marriage rates fell much more sharply over the same period. Separately, UN-based estimates indicate the share of never-married adults aged 25 to 54 worldwide rose from about 20 percent to 35 percent between 1990 and 2020, nearly doubling in three decades.
The World’s Married Population
Married adults remain the largest single marital status category in most countries, but the share has been declining almost everywhere with reliable long-run data. The U.S. trend illustrates the pattern clearly:
U.S. Marital Status Distribution, 1950 vs. 2000
| Marital Status | 1950 | 2000 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Married | 63.9% | 51.3% | -12.6 points |
| Never married | 21.1% | 27.1% | +6.0 points |
| Divorced | 2.2% | 9.8% | +7.6 points |
| Widowed | 8.2% | 6.6% | -1.6 points |
| Separated | 1.9% | 2.2% | +0.3 points |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau decennial census and Current Population Survey data, as compiled in peer-reviewed demographic analysis of 1950-2000 marital status change.
The rise in the divorced share and the fall in the widowed share moved in opposite directions over the same fifty years, a reminder that these four categories interact: rising divorce adds to one category while rising life expectancy, which keeps more couples married longer before one partner dies, reduces the widowed share, at least until population aging outweighs that effect.
The Growing Importance of Never Married Populations
The near doubling of the globally never-married share among 25-to-54-year-olds, from roughly 20 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2020, is one of the most significant shifts in the world’s marital status composition of the past generation. It reflects the same forces driving the broader marriage decline: delayed marriage, extended education, greater female economic independence and a growing acceptance of remaining unmarried, whether temporarily or permanently, well into or through what earlier generations would have considered prime marrying age.
Divorce and Remarriage
The divorced share of the adult population has generally risen over the long term in countries with historical data, even where annual divorce rates have recently been falling, because the divorced category is a stock that accumulates over time. The U.S. divorced share rose more than fourfold, from 2.2 percent in 1950 to 9.8 percent in 2000. Remarriage complicates the picture further: many divorced people eventually remarry, which moves them back into the married category and can mask the true cumulative incidence of divorce if only a single point-in-time snapshot is examined.
Widowhood and Population Ageing
Widowhood is overwhelmingly a female experience statistically, a direct consequence of women’s longer life expectancy combined with the tendency for women to marry men slightly older than themselves in most societies. Canada’s 2006 census data illustrate the scale of this gender gap clearly: 2.5 percent of men aged 15 and over were widowed, compared with 9.7 percent of women, nearly a fourfold difference. The gap was sharpest in some provinces: in Saskatchewan, the 2006 data showed just 2.7 percent of men widowed against 11.6 percent of women, an almost 9-percentage-point spread.
As populations age worldwide, the absolute number of widowed people, particularly widowed women, is set to keep rising even in countries where the widowed share of the total population has fallen slightly due to rising life expectancy extending joint survival of couples.
How Marital Status Differs by Age and Sex
Marital status composition shifts dramatically across the life course, following a broadly consistent pattern across the countries with detailed age-specific data. In illustrative age-banded survey data, never-married shares are highest among young adults, at 62.3 percent among men aged 18 to 29 and 53.5 percent among women in the same age band, before falling sharply to single digits among people 50 and older. Widowhood shows the opposite pattern entirely, rising from close to zero among young adults to 37.7 percent among women 50 and older in the same illustrative dataset, against a far lower 13.2 percent among men of the same age, again reflecting the female longevity advantage.
Canada’s national 2006 census confirms the sex gap holds nationally, not just in illustrative samples: 49.4 percent of men and 46.5 percent of women aged 15 and over were legally married, while 38.2 percent of men and 31.8 percent of women had never married, and, as noted above, women were nearly four times as likely as men to be widowed.
What Changing Marital Status Means for Households
A population with a rising never-married share and a rising divorced share, even where the widowed share is stable or falling, produces more one-person and non-family households than a population dominated by lifelong first marriages. This connects directly to two other major demographic shifts of the past several decades: the global rise in one-person households and the general decline in average household size, both of which are, in part, downstream consequences of the shift in marital status composition documented in this analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What percentage of people are married worldwide?
A single precise global percentage is difficult to state because of differing national definitions and survey years, but the share of women married or in a union worldwide has held close to 64 percent as of 2024, down only modestly from 69 percent in 1970.
2. What is the difference between single and never married?
“Never married” refers strictly to people who have not yet married at any point. “Single” is often used more loosely in everyday speech to include divorced or widowed people who are not currently married, even though they have been married before, which is a technically distinct status.
3. Why are more older women widowed than older men?
Because women generally live longer than men and tend to marry men close to their own age or slightly older, meaning wives are statistically more likely to outlive their husbands than the reverse, producing the large widowhood gender gap documented in national census data.
4. How is marital status measured?
Primarily through national censuses and household surveys that classify each adult into one of several categories, typically never married, currently married, separated, divorced and widowed, compiled internationally by projects such as the UN’s World Marriage Data.
5. Has the never-married population grown worldwide?
Yes, substantially among people of prime marrying age. The global share of never-married adults aged 25 to 54 rose from about 20 percent in 1990 to roughly 35 percent in 2020.
6. Is the married population shrinking everywhere?
In most countries with long historical data, yes, as a share of the adult population, though the pace and starting point vary considerably, and marriage remains far more prevalent in some regions, particularly South Asia and parts of the Middle East, than in Europe or North America.
7. What percentage of divorced people eventually remarry?
Rates vary substantially by country and are not consistently tracked globally, but remarriage is common enough in several high-divorce countries, including Russia and the Maldives, to meaningfully affect the size of the divorced category at any single point in time.
8. Does rising life expectancy reduce widowhood?
It can, since couples who both live longer are more likely to remain married until very old age rather than one partner being widowed decades earlier, though population aging overall still increases the absolute number of widowed people even when the proportional widowed share changes only slightly.
9. Which sex is more likely to never marry?
Data vary by country, but in several national datasets, including illustrative U.S. and Canadian figures, men show a somewhat higher never-married share than women in the same age bands, a pattern connected to differing marriage-market dynamics by sex and age.
10. Why does marital status matter for understanding population trends?
Because it directly shapes household formation, fertility timing and the prevalence of one-person and single-parent households, making marital status distribution a foundational input for understanding almost every other demographic trend documented in this cluster.
Sources
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Marriage Data 2019
- Our World in Data, “Marriages and Divorces,” share of women married or in a union, 1970-2024
- U.S. Census Bureau, Decennial Censuses 1950-2000 and Current Population Survey, marital status distribution analysis
- Statistics Canada, 2006 Census, marital status by sex and census division
- Peer-reviewed demographic analysis, “Change in Marital Status, 1950-2000,” Demography journal archive via PMC
