US marriages have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, with more than 2m such unions in 2022 – while the divorce rate continued to fall, according to the federal government.
The total of almost 2.1m “I do’s” in 2022 marks a 4% increase from the year before. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the data on Friday, but it has not released marriage data for last year.
In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were only 1.7m US weddings – the lowest number recorded since 1963. The pandemic threw many marriage plans into disarray, as communities ordered people to stay at home and banned large gatherings to limit the spread of Covid, which has killed more than a million Americans and millions more around the world.
US marriages then rose in 2021, but not to pre-pandemic levels. They ticked up again in 2022 and surpassed 2019 marriage statistics by a small margin.
New York, the District of Columbia and Hawaii saw the largest increases in marriages from 2021 to 2022. Nevada, home to Las Vegas’s quickie wedding chapels, continued to have the highest marriage rate in the nation, though it slightly decreased from 2021.
The number and rate of US divorces in 2022 fell slightly, continuing a downward trend, the CDC said.
Overall, marriages remain far less common than they once were in the US.
According to data that goes back to 1900, weddings hit their height in 1946, when the marriage rate was 16.4 per 1,000 people. The rate was above 10 in the early 1980s before beginning a decades-long decline. In 2022, the marriage rate was 6.2 per 1,000 population.
The Associated Press contributed reporting