Countries with the Highest (and Lowest) Marriage Rates (2025)
Photo: Jonathan Borba / Pexels
Marriage is simultaneously a legal contract, a cultural ritual, a religious sacrament, and a demographic indicator. Global marriage rates — measured as marriages per 1,000 people per year — range from below 3 in parts of East Asia to above 20 in the Maldives. That 7-fold spread is not random: it reflects differences in legal systems, religious norms, economic conditions, and the extent to which marriage is treated as a prerequisite for having children. The direction of travel almost everywhere is downward — but the consequences of that decline depend almost entirely on what replaces marriage as a pathway to parenthood.
Key takeaways
- The Maldives (20.2 per 1,000) has the world's highest crude marriage rate — an artifact of easy divorce and frequent remarriage in the legal framework.
- South Korea (3.5) and Japan (4.5) are experiencing a generational rejection of marriage among younger people, with direct consequences for birth rates and demographic futures.
- Marriage rates in Western Europe have fallen 40–60% since 1970, but birth rates have not fallen as sharply because cohabitation and non-marital births are socially normalised.
- East Asia's crisis is different: cohabitation without marriage is still stigmatised in South Korea and Japan, so declining marriage directly produces declining births.
- The US (6.1) has seen steady decline from 11.0 in 1972, with the steepest fall among college-educated women, who increasingly delay or forgo marriage.
Where this data comes from
The marriage statistics and country rankings in this article draw from two primary sources: the UN Statistics Division Demographic Yearbook (which compiles civil registration data from national statistical offices on all registered marriages) and the OECD Family Database (which standardises marriage, cohabitation, and birth rate data for OECD member countries). The data reflects 2023 figures for most countries, with 2022 data for some nations that report on delayed schedules. The crude marriage rate — marriages per 1,000 population per year — is the most internationally comparable metric available because it requires only civil registration records without demographic surveys or interviews. All figures measure registered legal marriages; they exclude cohabitation without legal registration, which in some countries (Scandinavia, France) represents a significant portion of formal partnerships.
How marriage rates are measured — and what they miss
The crude marriage rate (CMR) measures registered marriages per 1,000 people in the total population per year. It is the most widely comparable figure across countries, but it has well-documented limitations.
Age structure matters. A country with a young population naturally produces more marriages per 1,000 residents than a country with an aging one, simply because more people are in prime marrying age. Age-standardised rates correct for this but are less available for international comparison.
Legal recognition varies. In countries where cohabitation carries legal rights equivalent to marriage (France's PACS civil solidarity pact, Sweden's sambo status), people opt out of formal marriage registration without opting out of committed partnership. Raw CMR in these countries understates partnership formation.
Remarriage inflates top-ranked countries. The Maldives's CMR of 20.2 reflects a legal system that makes divorce and remarriage straightforward — many adults in the statistics are contracting their second or third marriage. The high rate measures re-marriage velocity as much as new partnership formation.
The most useful comparisons combine CMR with the total fertility rate (TFR) and the non-marital birth rate — because these three together reveal whether declining marriage is an existential demographic threat (South Korea) or a social reorganisation with limited demographic impact (Sweden).
Source: UN Statistics Division Demographic Yearbook (2023) — crude marriage rates by country, most recent available year.
Source: OECD Family Database (2024) — marriage, cohabitation, and non-marital birth rates across OECD member states.
Marriage rates by country
(Marriages per 1,000 population, latest available year)
Leaders (Highest rates)
| Country | Rate | Trend | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maldives | 20.2 | Stable | High divorce + remarriage rate |
| Tajikistan | 8.3 | Stable | Cultural tradition; young marriage |
| Egypt | 8.0 | Declining | — |
| Turkey | 7.9 | Declining | — |
| Iran | 7.5 | Declining | — |
Moderate-High
| Country | Rate | Trend | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 6.1 | Declining | Down from 11.0 in 1972 |
| Russia | 6.0 | Volatile | Drops during economic crises |
| Poland | 5.9 | Declining | — |
| Romania | 5.7 | Stable | Religious tradition strong |
| Australia | 5.3 | Declining | — |
Moderate
| Country | Rate | Trend | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 4.5 | Declining | — |
| Japan | 4.5 | Declining rapidly | — |
| United Kingdom | 4.4 | Declining | — |
| Sweden | 5.3 | Declining | Cohabitation normalised |
| France | 3.5 | Declining | PACS alternative common |
Low and Declining
| Country | Rate | Trend | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| South Korea | 3.5 | Crisis level | Historic low; government alarm |
| Spain | 3.6 | Declining | — |
| Portugal | 3.9 | Declining | — |
| Italy | 3.4 | Declining | — |
| Switzerland | 5.3 | Declining | — |
Why marriage rates are collapsing in East Asia but stabilising in the West
The marriage crisis differs dramatically between East Asia and the Western world, revealing what drives the decline: not marriage as an institution, but the economic and gender context surrounding it. In the US and Western Europe, marriage rates fell from 11.0 (US 1972) to 6.1 (current) — a 45% decline — but birth rates fell less sharply because cohabitation replaced marriage as the pathway to parenthood. Sweden now has 50% of births outside marriage; France has 60%. The marriage decline in the West is a formalisation shift, not a partnership collapse. In South Korea and Japan, marriage rates have fallen equally sharply (South Korea to 3.5, Japan to 4.5), but cohabitation has not expanded as a substitute — non-marital births remain near zero. This means East Asia's marriage decline is a birth rate decline: every young couple who forgoes marriage or delays it is a birth that does not happen. The structural difference: Western women who leave marriages or forgo formalisation can still have children and maintain careers. East Asian women face binary choices: career or family, formalised or invisible. The policy lesson is that marriage rate trends tell you little without knowing what replaces marriage. In the West, marriage is optional; in East Asia, marriage remains functional necessity for motherhood.
Historical context: 50 years of decline in wealthy countries
In 1972, the US crude marriage rate was 11.0 per 1,000 — nearly double its current 6.1. Western Europe's rates in the early 1970s were similarly high by today's standards, typically 7–9 per 1,000. The decline since then is not a recent panic; it has been a steady, consistent multi-decade trend across almost every high-income democracy.
The mechanisms driving the decline are well-documented. Women's labour force participation increased sharply through the 1970s–1990s, which reduced the economic necessity of marriage as a financial arrangement. Contraception and the sexual revolution separated sex and childbearing from marriage as a legal prerequisite. Cohabitation — living together without formal marriage — became socially acceptable and eventually socially unremarkable in most Western societies.
The economist Gary Becker's theory of marriage, developed in the 1970s, framed marriage as a specialisation and trade contract: men specialised in market work, women in household production, and they gained mutual economic benefit from formalising the arrangement. As women entered the labour market at equal or greater rates than men, this economic rationale weakened. Marriage persisted — but it shifted from an economic necessity to an expression of personal commitment.
By the 1990s, sociologists were documenting what they called the "deinstitutionalisation of marriage" — the process by which marriage lost its singular status as the primary framework for adult partnership and family formation. This is not the same as a decline in relationships or partnership; it is a decline in the formal, legal expression of those arrangements.
The picture in East Asia diverged from this Western pattern. Marriage rates declined there too — but the social and legal alternatives did not develop at the same pace.
Source: Cherlin, A.J. (2004) — "The deinstitutionalization of American marriage," Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(4). Foundational sociological framework for understanding US and Western marriage decline.
South Korea: the world's most extreme demographic experiment
South Korea is experiencing what demographers consider a historically unprecedented social transformation. Its marriage rate fell to 3.5 per 1,000 in 2023. More consequentially, its total fertility rate dropped to 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest ever recorded for any country at any time in demographic history.
For context: a TFR of 2.1 is needed to maintain population size without immigration. France, considered to have a low TFR among wealthy European nations, sits at 1.8. Japan, already regarded as a demographic crisis, has a TFR of 1.2. South Korea's 0.72 is in entirely uncharted territory.
The cause is not simply economics — it reflects a structural collision between traditional gender expectations embedded in Korean institutions and the new social reality of highly educated, career-oriented women.
The structural drivers:
South Korean women face a steep trade-off between career and family. Once married — and especially once pregnant — career advancement becomes practically difficult. South Korean workplaces still operate on long-hours cultures, and the expectation that women assume primary responsibility for childcare, housework, and in-law management (including care of husbands' parents) means marriage represents a significant loss of personal autonomy for women who have alternatives.
Young men face parallel pressures. Military service (mandatory for all South Korean men, typically 18–21 months) delays career starts. Housing costs in Seoul are among the highest globally relative to incomes. The cultural expectation that a man be financially stable before proposing marriage — owning or renting an adequate apartment, having a stable job — means the bar for readiness to marry is high.
The cultural rejection:
The "sampo generation" (포기세대) is a widely used Korean term for young people giving up on three things: dating, marriage, and children. The "o-po generation" added career and homeownership to the list. The 4B movement (비연애, 비성, 비결혼, 비출산 — no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children) became visible particularly among young feminist women as an explicit response to perceived gender inequality. These are not fringe positions — they reflect mainstream attitudes among younger South Koreans.
The policy response:
The South Korean government has spent over $200 billion on pro-natalist policies over two decades: baby bonuses (up to $200,000 in some municipalities), free childcare, parental leave subsidies, housing benefits for families. The effect on fertility has been essentially zero.
This is the clearest demonstration that financial incentives cannot override structural disincentives. The problem is not that young South Koreans cannot afford children — though that is part of it. The problem is that the institutional and cultural infrastructure of Korean society makes having children while maintaining a career and personal autonomy nearly impossible for women, and financially and emotionally overwhelming for men. No bonus payment resolves that.
Source: Statistics Korea (2024) — South Korea total fertility rate and crude marriage rate data.
Source: Kim, J. (2023) — Analysis of South Korean pro-natalist policy outcomes, Korea Economic Review.
Japan: parallel pressures, different expression
Japan's fertility rate (1.2) and marriage rate (4.5, falling) tell a story with important similarities to South Korea but distinct cultural inflections.
Herbivore men and women choosing independence:
The cultural category of "herbivore men" (草食系男子) — men disinterested in romantic pursuit, passive, consumption-averse, and content without relationships — entered Japanese social discourse around 2008 and became a widely discussed phenomenon. Its precise scale is difficult to measure, but surveys consistently show significant proportions of young Japanese men reporting no desire to enter romantic relationships. Simultaneously, a growing category of women — sometimes called "carnivore women" in the popular press — is choosing career-focused independence over the traditional expectations attached to Japanese marriage.
The cost structure of Japanese marriage:
Japanese weddings average $35,000–$40,000. Moving to a larger apartment is an expectation. The social norm that the wife reduces or ends paid work after having children means marriage carries a substantial opportunity cost for women in a society where once-interrupted career tracks are hard to re-enter.
The non-marital birth rate:
Japan has near-zero non-marital births — approximately 2–3% of all births. In France or Sweden, 50–60% of births occur outside formal marriage. This means Japan has almost no demographic buffer against declining marriage. Every married couple who delays marriage or forgoes it entirely is a birth that does not happen. South Korea is in an identical position, with non-marital births at approximately 3%.
Source: National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Japan (2024) — fertility and marriage rate data.
The Nordic model: marriage optional, children common
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland have low marriage rates (3.5–5.5 per 1,000) but relatively high birth rates (1.5–1.8 TFR) — apparently paradoxical but entirely explicable.
Cohabitation as legal status:
Sweden's sambo ("living together") status is a legally recognised relationship that carries inheritance rights, parental rights, and tax treatment nearly equivalent to formal marriage. In practice, it costs little to forgo the ceremony and paperwork of formal marriage in Sweden because the legal protections of partnership are available regardless. France's PACS (Pacte civil de solidarité) is a similar mechanism, used by hundreds of thousands of couples annually as an alternative to marriage.
Structural support for non-marital parenthood:
Nordic countries have invested heavily in systems that remove the economic and career penalty from having children outside formal marriage: generous parental leave for both parents (with "daddy quota" provisions that ensure men take significant time off, reducing the career-gap experienced exclusively by women), universal subsidised childcare from age one, and strong legal protections for children regardless of whether their parents are married.
The result is that Nordic women face a much smaller trade-off between career and family than their East Asian counterparts. The career-vs-family collision that drives South Korea's demographic crisis is substantially mitigated by structural policy in Scandinavia.
The lesson for policy:
The Nordic evidence suggests that birth rates respond not to marriage incentives but to the removal of career penalties for having children — particularly for women. Pro-marriage policies, if they do not also address the structural costs of childrearing, appear ineffective at raising fertility.
Source: OECD Family Database (2024) — Nordic country fertility rates, parental leave data, non-marital birth rates.
The Maldives: serial monogamy at scale
The Maldives occupies a unique position in global marriage statistics that deserves explanation rather than just a top ranking. Its CMR of 20.2 per 1,000 reflects a legal and social system quite different from anywhere else.
The Maldivian legal system permits divorce under Islamic law with relative ease. The country has long had one of the world's highest divorce rates alongside its highest marriage rate — they are the same phenomenon. Adults who marry young, divorce, and remarry appear multiple times in the marriage statistics, inflating the crude rate far above what it would be if measured as "first marriages per unmarried adult."
The population is approximately 520,000. A CMR of 20.2 implies roughly 10,500 marriages per year — for every 50 residents, one marriage is occurring. That rate is plausible only because it counts all marriages, including second and third. The Maldives is less a model of widespread romantic partnership and more a demonstration of how legal ease of remarriage produces statistical outliers.
Arranged marriage: persistence and transformation
Formal arranged marriage — where parents select a spouse without the young person's input — is declining globally. It remains most common in parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East.
Semi-arranged marriage — where families make introductions and facilitate meetings but the individuals make their own choice — remains common and may be growing in a modified form. India's marriage rate (approximately 6.5 per 1,000) is partly sustained by family-facilitated introductions that occur at younger ages and under stronger social pressure than the Western model of entirely self-directed romantic partner selection.
India's marriage rate, notably, does not reflect the East Asian pattern of collapsing marriage despite economic development. This is because the social infrastructure of Indian marriage — family involvement, community pressure, and the continued stigma of remaining unmarried past a certain age — provides ongoing pressure to marry that does not exist in the same form in South Korea or Japan.
Source: UN Population Division (2022) — World Marriage Data 2022, trends in age at marriage and marriage rates by region.
Economic consequences of declining marriage rates
Declining marriage rates in societies where marriage is strongly linked to childbearing carry significant economic consequences beyond the obvious demographic ones.
Labour force contraction: South Korea's population is projected to decline from 51 million to approximately 36 million by 2100 under current fertility projections. A shrinking workforce supports a growing retired population — the dependency ratio problem that drives pension system stress across East Asia and, to a lesser extent, Southern Europe.
Housing markets: Marriage has historically been a driver of household formation — two people forming one household. Delayed marriage, combined with preference for single living among educated young adults, produces more solo households and drives housing demand in urban areas even as underlying population may be declining.
Gender and income effects: Research across multiple countries consistently finds that married men earn more than unmarried men, controlling for other characteristics — the so-called "marriage premium." The cause is disputed (does marriage cause higher productivity, or do higher earners attract and retain spouses?), but the pattern is robust in Western data. For women, the marriage premium is smaller or negative in countries with traditional gender role expectations — marriage reduces women's earnings by reducing their labour force participation or career advancement.
Frequently asked questions
Q: What is the global divorce rate? A: The US has one of the highest divorce rates among wealthy nations at approximately 2.5 per 1,000 (roughly 40–50% of marriages ending in divorce by lifetime cohort projection). Russia and Belarus also have high rates, around 4 per 1,000. Japan's divorce rate has increased to approximately 1.7, but remarriage is culturally less common than in the West, keeping the CMR depressed. The Maldives has both the highest marriage rate and the highest divorce rate globally — a pattern consistent with serial monogamy facilitated by easy legal remarriage.
Q: Does a low marriage rate directly cause a low birth rate? A: It depends entirely on cultural norms around non-marital births. In countries where births outside marriage are common (France: 62%, Sweden: 54%, UK: 52%), low marriage rates do not directly produce low birth rates — people have children in committed relationships without formalising them legally. In countries where non-marital births carry strong social stigma (South Korea: 3%, Japan: 2–3%), declining marriage and declining births are essentially synonymous. East Asia's uniquely low fertility is a direct function of this dynamic.
Q: Is arranged marriage increasing or decreasing globally? A: Formal arranged marriage (parental selection without young person's input) is declining globally as education and urbanisation increase individual agency in partner selection. Semi-arranged marriage — family-facilitated introductions with individual consent — persists and in some contexts is increasing as an organised response to declining social networks for meeting partners. India's marriage rate is sustained partly by this system. Urban professional communities in India increasingly use matrimonial apps (Shaadi.com, BharatMatrimony) that function as technology-mediated semi-arranged introductions.
Q: Can government policy reverse declining marriage rates? A: The evidence is not encouraging. South Korea's $200 billion of pro-natalist spending over 20 years has produced no measurable effect on marriage or fertility rates. Hungary's aggressive pro-family policy — offering lifetime income tax exemptions to women who have four or more children — has produced modest increases in fertility from a very low base but nothing approaching replacement level. The implication is that structural causes (gender inequality in career-family trade-offs, housing costs, cultural norms) cannot be overcome by financial incentives alone.
Q: Which region has the fastest-changing marriage patterns? A: East Asia is experiencing the most rapid change. South Korea's TFR of 0.72, Japan's rapid CMR decline, and China's falling marriage registrations (down approximately 40% from peak to 2023) represent the most compressed demographic transformation in recorded history. The region has moved from marriage rates comparable to 1970s Western Europe to significantly below them within a single generation, without developing the cohabitation and non-marital birth norms that buffered the Western transition.
Q: Does religion predict marriage rates? A: Yes, with significant correlation. Muslim-majority countries generally have higher marriage rates, reflecting religious emphasis on marriage as the exclusive legitimate framework for sexual and family life. Predominantly Catholic countries in Southern Europe have seen dramatic declines from historically high rates. Predominantly Buddhist East Asian societies have some of the world's lowest rates. However, religion is a correlate, not a determinant — South Korea's non-religious young urbanites are driving the extreme decline regardless of traditional Confucian family values in the older generation.
Sources
Source: UN Statistics Division Demographic Yearbook (2023) — crude marriage rates by country.
Source: OECD Family Database (2024) — marriage, cohabitation, non-marital birth, and parental leave data.
Source: Statistics Korea (2024) — South Korea TFR, marriage rate, population projections.
Source: National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Japan (2024) — Japan fertility and marriage trends.
Source: Cherlin, A.J. (2004) — "The deinstitutionalization of American marriage," Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(4).
Source: UN Population Division (2022) — World Marriage Data 2022.
The takeaway
Marriage rates are declining in virtually every wealthy country — but the consequences vary dramatically by cultural context. Where non-marital births are socially accepted, as in Scandinavia and France, declining marriage rates are a social reorganisation with manageable demographic effects. Where marriage is the near-exclusive pathway to parenthood, as in South Korea and Japan, collapsing marriage rates directly produce population collapse. South Korea's TFR of 0.72 is the world's most dramatic and consequential demographic experiment — and the evidence from 20 years of failed pro-natalist policy is that financial incentives cannot substitute for structural change in how societies distribute the costs of childrearing between women, men, employers, and the state.
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About the Author
SciHub101 is an independent science and technology publication founded and edited by Buğra Sözeri, a software engineer and app developer based in Türkiye. AI tools assist with drafting and research. Source documentation in the existing archive is uneven, and articles are being reviewed and corrected. The Editorial Team byline identifies editorial responsibility; it does not certify specialist or independent human review. Where we compare products, anything built by our own team is labelled as such — see the editorial guidelines and About page for how corrections and disclosures work.
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