Young Americans are Marrying Later or Never

Based on new data from the National Survey of Family Growth

I’ve written before about changes in marriage patterns in the U.S., and it’s one of the examples in Chapter 13 of the new third edition of Think Stats. My analysis uses data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). Today they released the most recent data, from surveys conducted in 2022 and 2023. So here are the results, updated with the newest data:

The patterns are consistent with what we’ve see in previous iterations — each successive cohort marries later than the previous one, and it looks like an increasing percentage of them will remain unmarried.

Data: National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). (2024). 2022–2023 National Survey of Family Growth Public Use Data and Documentation. Hyattsville, MD: CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Retrieved from NSFG 2022–2023 Public Use Data Files, December 11, 2024.

My analysis is in this Jupyter notebook.