The figure for opposite-sex marriages has risen from 12.7 years in 2023 and a low of 8.9 years in 1985. At the same time, the proportion of couples divorcing during their first decade of marriage has fallen sharply. Among couples who married in 2015, an estimated 16.3% had divorced by their 10th anniversary, compared with 24.7% of those who married in 1995.
The ONS research does not give any answers as to why marriages are ending later. But it does suggest several hypotheses, including that couples may delay the legal end of their relationships until they can afford what comes next. Prof Emma Hitchings, the deputy head of the University of Bristol law school, who led the Fair Shares project, a nationally representative study in England and Wales examining how divorcing couples divide their money and property, said: “Divorce may have become legally easier, with the advent of no-fault divorces, but separating one household into two has not.” She said that the longer a couple stayed together, the more tightly entwined – and harder to untangle – their finances became.
Then throw in the cuts to legal aid for almost all private family law proceedings in England and Wales, and you can see why couples need to spend more time trying to calculate how they can feasibly afford to separate – which may well account for why marriages are lasting longer before divorce.” Celia said she and Martyn had a number of friends who also broke up after marriages of similar lengths. But we have three groups of friends, across Europe and in the US, who went through divorces after marriages of a decade or more.” The research bears out Celia’s experience. In the US, the Pew Research Center found that the median length of marriages ending in divorce rose from 10 years in 2008 to 12 years in 2023.
Germany’s federal statistics office put the average length of marriages ending in divorce at 14.6 years in 2025. In the Netherlands, the figure was 14.7 years. Belgium’s statistics office recorded a median of 12.03 years in 2024.
The figures are not directly comparable as countries collect and present divorce statistics differently. But the broad pattern of marriages lasting longer before divorce is not solely a British phenomenon. Anne Barlow, professor emeritus of family law and policy at the University of Exeter, said there was a curious feature of the British figures.
One possibility was that knowing you could leave made it easier to wait, said Dr Alexander Maine, a senior lecturer at the City law school who leads a research project called: “Queer families and the law after ‘I do’.” “Another is that no-fault divorce could allow couples to work through a separation without the acrimony that previously accompanied assigning blame,” he said. Certainly, experts find no problem in pointing to other possible reasons for marriages lasting longer before divorce, from disruption to the family courts affecting the timing of divorces in the years around Covid, as well as influencing the duration figures, to the 2022 changes introducing a minimum 20-week period between the start of proceedings and application for a final order. Julia Carter, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, who is researching couples living together after divorce or separation, said wider global and environmental uncertainty was also having an impact.
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