Across Western Europe, the United States and Australia, marriage rates have declined over the long term while the age at which people first marry has risen. Young adults are increasingly postponing marriage – or foregoing it altogether.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the crude marriage rate in the country fell from 5.5 marriages per 1,000 people aged 16 and over in 2024 to 5.3 in 2025. The largest declines in age-specific marriage rates were among people aged 25 to 29 and 30 to 34 – traditionally prime marrying ages.
A similar long-term trend is visible across Europe. Eurostat estimates that 1.7 million marriages took place in the EU in 2024, equivalent to 3.9 marriages per 1,000 people. In 1964, the rate was 8.0, meaning it has more than halved over six decades.
There are sharply different interpretations of this transformation. One view, expressed recently in The Guardian, is that younger generations are approaching marriage more cautiously, entering it when they feel ready rather than because social convention expects them to do so.
But changing attitudes are only part of the story.
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Marriage Comes Later
Economic conditions also influence when young people form families. High housing costs, rising living expenses and financial insecurity can make independence harder to achieve. For generations accustomed to associating marriage and children with a stable home and income, those milestones are increasingly being pushed further into the future.
Financial pressures are not necessarily the sole reason young adults postpone marriage. But research cited in the debate suggests that Gen Z and millennials are delaying important life decisions because of concerns about money.
The retreat of marriage is occurring alongside another profound demographic change – falling fertility.
A total fertility rate of roughly 2.1 children per woman is generally considered the replacement level required to maintain a population over the long term in the absence of migration. The EU is nowhere close.
In 2024, its total fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.34 children per woman. Bulgaria recorded the highest rate at 1.72, followed by France at 1.61 and Slovenia at 1.52. Malta had the lowest at 1.01, followed by Spain at 1.10 and Lithuania at 1.11.
The figures illustrate how dramatically the timetable of family formation has changed. Across the EU, the average age of women having their first child reached 29.9 in 2024, one year higher than a decade earlier.
Historically, marriage provided a stable framework for raising children and transferring property, responsibilities and values between generations. Its declining prevalence therefore has implications that extend beyond the private choices of individual couples.
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A Different Path to Adulthood
As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, marrying young was common across much of Europe. Marriage was close to a social norm and most people married before reaching 30.
That pattern began to change markedly after 1990.
By 2024, the average age at first marriage in Europe had risen, with first marriages increasingly taking place in people's 30s rather than their 20s.
The significance of the change goes beyond postponing a wedding by a few years. Today's young adults are following a fundamentally different path into family life from that of their parents and grandparents.
Marriage increasingly comes after higher education, several years in the workforce and often a lengthy period of unmarried cohabitation. For some, it never comes at all.
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Marriage Is Becoming Less Universal
The statistics do not show that marriage is disappearing. They show that it is becoming less universal and taking place later.
Those who marry increasingly do so after establishing themselves professionally and financially. At the same time, a larger proportion of the population is likely to remain unmarried or postpone marriage into later adulthood.
This development coincides with later parenthood and historically low fertility. That does not mean declining marriage rates alone are causing falling birth rates. Housing costs, economic insecurity, changing social norms, contraception, education, women's participation in the workforce and individual preferences all form part of a much more complicated demographic picture.
Two interpretations nevertheless dominate the debate.
One regards later and less frequent marriage as evidence of greater individual freedom. People are no longer compelled by social expectations to marry young and can wait until they believe they have found the right partner – or choose not to marry at all.
The other emphasizes what may be lost as marriage becomes less central to adult life: earlier family formation, greater demographic continuity and the stabilizing role traditionally associated with long-term marital households.
Statistics cannot settle that argument because it is ultimately also an argument about values.
What they can establish is the scale of the transformation. Young Europeans are marrying later, having children later and living through a period of exceptionally low fertility. Marriage has not disappeared – but it is no longer the near-universal institution it once was.
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