Data

Share of marriages in England and Wales that ended in divorce

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What you should know about this indicator

How is this data described by its producer?

The decrease in the number of divorces between 2017 and 2018, and the increase between 2018 and 2019 can be partly attributed to a delay in the processing of divorce applications by divorce centres. A backlog of divorce petitions made in 2017 were not processed until 2018, resulting in fewer completed divorces in 2018 and more completed divorces in 2019.

Divorces data for 2022 and marriages data for 2020 are the latest data which have been used in the production of this table. Marriages data for 2021 are not currently available and so this table is not complete.

Share of marriages in England and Wales that ended in divorce
The cumulative percentage of marriages that have ended in divorce by the anniversary year of marriage.
Source
UK Office for National Statistics (2025)with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 7, 2025
Next expected update
October 2026
Date range
1963–2018
Unit
%

Sources and processing

UK Office for National Statistics – Divorces in England and Wales

Annual divorce numbers and rates, by duration of marriage, sex, to whom granted, and reason.

Retrieved on
October 7, 2025
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Office for National Statistics (ONS), ONS website, dataset, Divorces in England and Wales, UK. Retrieved 7 October 2025.

Annual divorce numbers and rates, by duration of marriage, sex, to whom granted, and reason.

Retrieved on
October 7, 2025
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Office for National Statistics (ONS), ONS website, dataset, Divorces in England and Wales, UK. Retrieved 7 October 2025.

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of marriages in England and Wales that ended in divorce”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Veronika Samborska, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2020) - “Marriages and Divorces”. Data adapted from UK Office for National Statistics. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UK Office for National Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

UK Office for National Statistics (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of marriages in England and Wales that ended in divorce” [dataset]. UK Office for National Statistics, “Divorces in England and Wales” [original data]. Retrieved April 4, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

Quick download

Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/marriages-uk-ended-in-divorce.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear