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Amidst Declining Marriage Rates, Rural Residents Are Still More Likely to Marry [1]
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Date: 2025-02-07
Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
If you’re spending Valentine’s Day waiting for them to put a ring on it this year, don’t feel alone. Marriage rates have been dropping since the 1980s, according to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center.
Even though rural residents are more likely to marry than their big-city counterparts, the marriage rate in rural counties has been dropping along with the national average.
The first thing to know when we talk about marriage rates is that social scientists often use the inverse of “married” to talk about it. As the size of the population that has “never been married” goes up, the marriage rate is going down. So when you look at the graphs, remember when the number gets bigger, the marriage rate is actually declining.
With that out of the way, let’s look at the data.
According to a 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, in 1980 only 6% of 40-year-olds had never been married, but that jumped to nearly a quarter of 40-year-olds by 2021. Marriage rates among 40-year-olds varied by gender, race, and education, with men, Black Americans, and those without a four-year college degree being more likely to have never been married.
Richard Frye, Pew researcher and author of the 2023 report, wrote that some people might be simply delaying marriage instead of avoiding it altogether, however. One in four of the 40-year-old respondents who had not married in 2001 had tied the knot by the time they reached 60 years old, for example.
Marriage rates also dropped slightly in 2020 as people delayed their ceremonies because of pandemic-era shutdowns. The number of marriages rebounded in the years following the onset of the pandemic, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
But how does this trend break down by rural geography? Between 2013 and 2023, the last year of available data, the rate of rural adults who have never been married grew by 2 percentage points, from 27% to 29%. Rural areas, in other words, followed the national trend in declining marriage rates. But rural residents were still more likely to have been married than their urban and suburban counterparts.
The graph above shows how marriage rates break out by year and geography. Remember that the bigger the number on the graph, the lower the marriage rate is, since the numbers show the percentage of the population that has never been married.
Second, as the graph moves from left to right, the category becomes less urban and more rural.
Residents of cities with more than 1 million residents (on the left) were more likely to have never been married compared to rural residents (the cluster of bars on the right). In 2023, 39% of people over 15 years of age have never been married. That’s 10 percentage points higher than the rural population that had never been married.
In the suburbs of those major metros, the share of people over 15 years old who have never been married was 32% in 2023, up from 31% in 2013. That’s slightly lower than the 35% of people in medium-sized cities, or cities with populations between 250,000 and 1 million, who had never been married in 2023.
About 33% of residents of small cities, or metropolitan counties with fewer than 250,000 residents, had never been married in 2023, up from 30% in 2013.
Rural Marriage Rates Vary by State
Not all rural counties are the same, however.
In Whitman County, Washington, a community of about 48,00 people in the Eastern part of the state, 53% of residents over 15-years-old have never been married. In Isabella County, Michigan, a rural community in the middle of the state, 47% of residents have never been married.
On the other end of the spectrum are rural counties in Utah and Idaho, the two states with the highest rates of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially referred to as Mormons.
Data does, in fact, support the stereotype that people who live in Mormon strongholds are quick to tie the knot. In rural Wayne County, Utah, a community of approximately 2,600 that borders Canyonland National Park, only 13% of residents had never been married in 2023.
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