How long first marriages last

About half of first marriages in the US reach their twentieth anniversary. The odds are better than the old “half of all marriages end in divorce” line suggests, and they depend on when and how people marry.

The real odds · October 2026 · 4 min read

“Half of all marriages end in divorce” is one of the most repeated statistics in the world, and it has never been quite right. The more useful question for anyone thinking about their own life is narrower: if two people marry for the first time, how likely is it that they are still married ten or twenty years later?

The best answer for the United States comes from the National Survey of Family Growth, a large federal survey run by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which asks people about their relationship histories in detail.

The numbers

For first marriages, the survey estimated:

• a 68% chance for women and a 70% chance for men that the marriage lasts at least 10 years;
• a 52% chance for women and a 56% chance for men that it lasts at least 20 years.

So a first marriage has roughly a two-in-three chance of reaching ten years and a little better than even odds of reaching twenty. Most of the marriages that end do so in the first decade. A marriage that has reached its tenth anniversary is considerably more likely than a new one to reach its twentieth.

The survey counts a marriage as ended when the couple divorces or separates. Marriages ended by a death are treated differently, so these are, roughly, the odds that a marriage does not break up.

Why the numbers differ between people

Averages describe everybody and nobody. The same survey, and decades of research since, find that the odds shift with a few things that are known at the wedding:

• Age at marriage. People who marry in their late teens or very early twenties are much more likely to divorce than people who marry later. A good part of the difference is simply time: people change a great deal between eighteen and twenty-five.
• Education. Couples with college degrees have, on average, more stable first marriages. Education is tied up with income, and money trouble is one of the most common strains on a marriage.
• Living together first. Its effect has changed over the decades. It once predicted a higher chance of divorce; for couples who are engaged when they move in together, the difference has largely disappeared.
• Children. Having a child in the first years of a marriage, before the couple has much time alone together, puts strain on it. So does losing a child, or a long illness.

None of these is a verdict. Plenty of couples who married at twenty are married at seventy. They are odds, and they say more about the conditions a marriage starts in than about the two people in it.

What the number leaves out

A marriage that lasts is not the same as a happy marriage, and a marriage that ends is not the same as a failed one. Some long marriages are lonely. Some divorces are the best decision either person ever made. The statistics can count anniversaries; they cannot count how the years felt.

What research does suggest is that the quality of a long relationship is one of the strongest predictors of how people rate their whole lives, more than income or career. A good marriage protects health and happiness; a bad one damages both. That cuts both ways when it comes to the decision to stay.

Questions people ask

Is it really “half of all marriages end in divorce”? That line comes from comparing the number of divorces and marriages in a single year, which mixes up different people and different decades. The better measure follows couples over time. For first marriages in the US, a little over half last twenty years, and many of those that last twenty go on to last for life.

Are second marriages more or less stable? On average, second and later marriages end somewhat more often than first marriages, partly because the people in them have already shown they are willing to leave a marriage, and partly because they often bring children, debts and former partners with them.

When are divorces most likely? In the first ten years. The risk is highest in the early years and falls after that, which is why the chance of reaching twenty years is not much lower than the chance of reaching ten.

In One Life

Love in One Life is a chain of Life Questions. “Do you pursue this relationship?” comes first, then “Do you marry?”, and later, sometimes many years later, “Do you stay married?” Between them are the ordinary decisions that make up a relationship: whose job you move for, whether you say the hard thing, who does the night feeds, what you do when money is short.

The game tracks how close the two of you are, how much resentment has built up and how much strain the rest of the life is putting on the marriage. The odds of it lasting start from real numbers like these and move with every one of those choices. A marriage in One Life can last sixty years or six months, and the end of the life shows you which of your choices made the difference.