Updated August 6, 2026. Quick answer: divorce among people over 50 has more than doubled since 1990 while falling sharply among the young, and the median gray divorce ends a 29-year marriage. That combination — long marriage, late split, short runway — is what makes it a retirement problem rather than a legal one. Every figure below is from a named report, with its number and year.
The numbers
The median gray divorce ends a 29-year marriage. Among people aged 50 and older divorcing for the first time in 2022, “the median marital duration at time of first divorce… was 29 years.” A quarter had been married 22 years or fewer; a quarter, 37 years or more. [FP-24-12, American Community Survey 2022]
A gray divorce out of a remarriage ends an 18-year one. “Among those in a remarriage the median duration was 18 years” — eleven years shorter than a first marriage. The 25th percentile is nine years or fewer. Second marriages entered later end sooner, and the financial planning horizon is correspondingly shorter. [FP-24-12, American Community Survey 2022]
Short marriages are rare in first divorces and common in remarriages. Of people divorcing for the first time after 50, 3.6% had been married five years or fewer. Among those divorcing out of a remarriage, 15.3% had. More than four times the rate. [FP-24-12, American Community Survey 2022]
Divorce is falling for the young and rising for the old. Between 1990 and 2023 the refined divorce rate “decreased for those aged 15-44” and “increased for those aged 45 and older”. For the 15-24 group it fell from 47.2 to 19.2 per 1,000 married people. Gray divorce is not a story about more divorce; it is a story about where the divorce moved. [FP-25-24, NCHS 1990 and ACS 2023]
The rate for people 50 and older has more than doubled. The report states it plainly: “the rate for those aged 50 and older has more than doubled over the same period.” [FP-25-24, NCHS 1990 and ACS 2023]
For women 65 and older it went from 1.4 to 6.7 per 1,000. In 1990, 1.4 of every 1,000 married women aged 65 or older divorced in a year. In 2023 it was 6.7. This is the sharpest movement in the whole dataset, and it lands on the group with the least remaining time to rebuild retirement savings. [FP-25-24, NCHS 1990 and ACS 2023]
The 1990 baseline for everyone 65 and older was 1.8 per 1,000. That is the published starting point. We are not publishing a 2023 figure for the combined 65-and-older group, because the report gives it in a chart rather than in its text — see the note below on what we will not do. [FP-25-24, NCHS 1990]
Most gray divorces are somebody’s only one. Among men who had a gray divorce, 8.5% had two or more and 91.5% had only one. Among women, 6.5% had multiple and 93.5% had just one. The stereotype of the serial late-life divorcer describes a small minority. [FP-24-22, Health and Retirement Study 1998-2018]
What the numbers mean for money
A 29-year median marriage means the assets are joint by the time they are split — one pension, one house, one retirement account built across three decades. Dividing them is not a matter of who bought what. It is a matter of instruments: a QDRO for the retirement plan, the home-sale exclusion, and the carryover basis that decides who inherits the tax bill along with the asset.
The Social Security piece is the one people miss entirely: a marriage of at least ten years leaves a claim on an ex-spouse’s record that they cannot affect and are not notified about, and remarriage rules decide whether it survives. At a 29-year median, essentially every gray divorce clears that ten-year bar. The full picture is at divorce and your money.
The remarriage figure is the sharpest planning signal here. A second marriage ending after a median of 18 years, with a quarter ending inside nine, is why blended families need the beneficiary and estate work done at the start rather than assumed — beneficiary designations do not update themselves, and ERISA plans follow the form, not the will.
How we read this, and what we will not publish
Only figures stated in a report’s text appear above. FP-25-24 shows the 2023 divorce rate for the combined 65-and-older group in a chart but does not give the number in words, so we publish the 1990 baseline and the women-only series and leave the combined 2023 figure out. Reading a value off an axis and presenting it as a citation is how a plausible number becomes a permanent one.
Note also that these are refined divorce rates — divorces per 1,000 currently married people, not per 1,000 people. It is the right denominator for this question and it is not the one most headlines use, which is part of why gray-divorce coverage is so inconsistent.
Sources: NCFMR family profiles FP-25-24 (Westrick-Payne, 2025), FP-24-12 (Westrick-Payne & Brown, 2024) and FP-24-22 (Williams & Marino, 2024), National Center for Family & Marriage Research, Bowling Green State University, read August 6, 2026. Underlying data: National Center for Health Statistics (1990), American Community Survey (2022, 2023) and the Health and Retirement Study (1998-2018). More of our data work is at statistics. See methodology and corrections.
All the numbers, kept current. This page uses 5 figures from our claims register — every figure we track is on one page, each with the year it applies to and a plain statement of what makes it move.