How Many People Got Married in Australia in 2025? The Numbers Revealed

TL;DR: Australia registered 118,804 marriages in 2025. That was 1.7% fewer than in 2024, almost identical to 2023 and 4.4% more than in 2019. The latest five-year total was only 0.6% below the final five years before COVID, so Australia’s wedding market has not collapsed. But the crude marriage rate remains lower because the population aged 16 and over has grown. Couples are marrying later, Saturday is losing share, wedding formats are diversifying and government registries are growing in some states. Divorce rose in 2025, especially at older ages, but remained below its 2019 rate—and dividing annual divorces by annual marriages still does not tell us the lifetime chance of divorce.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released its 2025 marriage and divorce data, and the obvious headline is that marriage registrations fell by 1.7%.

That is true. It is also one of the least interesting things in the release.

If you want a gloomy headline, you can say Australia registered 2,040 fewer marriages than in 2024. If you want an optimistic one, you can say the 2025 count was nearly 5,000 higher than in 2019.

Both statements are factual. Neither tells the whole story.

My reading is that Australia’s wedding market has recovered in volume, but the national marriage rate has not. Marriage remains culturally dominant while becoming later, less automatic and less attached to one expensive, Saturday-heavy wedding format.

I am pro-marriage, pro-celebrancy and pro-wedding industry. That does not mean pretending every number is good. It means taking the numbers seriously enough to ask how we can make marriage more accessible, more meaningful and more worth choosing.

Marriage volume recovered, but the national rate did not

The annual fall is less important than the three-year plateau

Australia registered 118,804 marriages in 2025. That was:

• 2,040 fewer than in 2024, a fall of 1.7%;
• 365 more than in 2023, a rise of only 0.3%; and
• 4,989 more than in 2019, a rise of 4.4%.

The cleanest post-rebound story is not collapse or boom. Australia has recorded roughly 119,000 weddings a year for three years.

I will use the ordinary word “weddings” throughout, while the ABS measure is technically registered marriages. It does not count guest numbers, spending, supplier bookings, package sizes, lead times or whether the couple held a large reception. A stable wedding count does not guarantee a stable market for every venue, photographer, florist or celebrant package.

For the wedding industry, the pool of weddings is broadly back to its pre-pandemic scale. For society, marriages per 1,000 people aged 16 and over are lower. Those are two different truths in the same dataset.

Chart: Australian marriage registrations recovered to roughly 119,000 a year, while the crude marriage rate fell. Bars begin at zero. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2025.

The five-year result is healthy; the six-year ledger is not fully repaired

The latest five completed years compare surprisingly well with the final five years before COVID:

The raw five-year market is almost the same size: a difference of only 3,536 marriages, or 0.6%.

But the crude rate is materially lower. The rate is the annual number of marriages per 1,000 people aged 16 and over. It is not the percentage of single people who chose to marry, and it is not anyone’s individual probability of marriage. Its denominator includes people who are already married and people who have no intention of marrying. It is a broad social indicator.

The approximate five-year rates above are simple averages of the ABS annual rates, which are published to one decimal place. They are not pooled five-year rates.

There is also a six-year pandemic-and-aftermath ledger:

Across 2020–25, Australia averaged 108,900 marriage registrations a year. That was 5.8% below the 2015–19 annual average of 115,590.

If the pre-pandemic average had simply continued for six years, Australia would have recorded about 693,541 marriages. It actually recorded 653,402—a difference of 40,139.

That does not prove Australia permanently “lost” 40,139 marriages. Some couples married later, some separated, some decided marriage was unnecessary and some legally married overseas. The flat counterfactual is deliberately simple. It does prove that the 2022 rebound did not fully erase the cumulative registration gap.

Under that flat counterfactual, the 2022–25 surplus recovered about 36% of the two-year 2020–21 deficit.

So the honest big-picture line is:

Five-year marriage volume has recovered. The national marriage rate has not, and the full pandemic-and-aftermath ledger remains below the old annual pace.

The lower rate worries me because I believe healthy marriages can help underpin healthy families, stronger communities and a more connected society. That is my value judgement, not an ABS finding. The ABS can count marriage registrations; it cannot measure the quality of a relationship or the social good created inside it.

Australians are marrying later—and more intentionally

The under-30 market weakened while the 30–39 market grew

The median age at marriage may be levelling out. In 2025 it was 32.7 for men, down slightly for a second year, and 31.2 for women, unchanged for a third year.

But the age distribution has still moved deeper into people’s thirties.

For men, the highest age-specific marriage rate is now among 30–34-year-olds rather than 25–29-year-olds. For women, 25–29 still leads, but 30–34 is much closer than it was in 2019.

Participant counts make the shift tangible:

Chart: Under-30 participant counts fell between 2019 and 2025, while the number of people marrying in their thirties increased. Bars begin at zero. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2025.

This looks more like postponed marriage than wholesale rejection of it. But “postponed” is an interpretation, not a proven cause, and it is not permission to ignore the decline. No published age-specific marriage rate increased in 2025.

Cost of living, housing insecurity and wedding prices are plausible explanations. The ABS release does not prove that any of them caused the annual fall.

A marriage delayed for affordability reasons can still happen later. It can also be abandoned through inertia, separation or changing priorities. For some couples, delaying marriage may delay parenthood, shared financial planning or formal legal status. But many form households before marriage: the latest detailed data say 81.3% of couples who married in 2024 had already cohabited.

That is why I increasingly think of marriage as a capstone rather than a starting gun.

Marriage is less automatic, but it has not disappeared

The latest detailed 2024 figures, published by the Australian Institute of Family Studies using ABS data, show:

• 81.3% of marrying couples had cohabited;
• 74.0% were entering a first marriage for both partners;
• 83.2% of marriages were conducted by civil celebrants; and
• 16.4% were conducted by ministers of religion.

In 1970, the split was almost the reverse: 88.1% religious and 11.9% civil.

Civil marriage is now mainstream Australian marriage. But “civil” does not mean “independent civil celebrant”. It also includes government registry officers, and the annual public ABS tables no longer separate those markets.

The cultural change is enormous. Many couples now build a home, combine lives and perhaps have children before they marry. Marriage is no longer the automatic permission slip to begin adult life. It is often a deliberate public and legal act chosen after the relationship already exists.

That can make marriage more intentional. It can also make it endlessly postponable because the house, bills and shared life are already there.

A lower annual marriage rate also does not mean marriage has vanished from Australian life. In the 2021 Census household and family data, roughly four in five people recorded as living in a married or de facto couple were married. Annual marriage flow and the existing stock of married people are different measures.

Marriage remains culturally dominant while becoming less automatic. That is more interesting—and more accurate—than either “marriage is dying” or “everything is fine”.

Same-gender and non-binary-inclusive marriages are now part of that ordinary baseline. They represented 4,636 registrations, or 3.9% of all marriages, in 2025. The share has been broadly stable for three years. Marriages involving at least one non-binary partner rose from 231 to 260. The initial post-marriage-equality catch-up appears to have settled, although changes to how sex and gender are collected complicate long comparisons.

The Australian wedding economy is changing shape

Couples may be compressing the wedding rather than rejecting the marriage

If people want to marry but believe they need $35,000 or $40,000 before they can do it, that is not a failure of marriage. It is a failure of how parts of the wedding market have packaged marriage.

A paperwork-only, celebrant-led wedding can cost about $700.

The price explodes when a couple chooses to invite guests and provide a venue, dinner, drinks, furniture, flowers, styling, photography, entertainment and transport. There is real labour and value in those things. But a paperwork-only wedding and a large hosted wedding are not the same purchase.

That is why I have argued before that an “average Australian wedding cost” is a poor instruction to an individual couple. A mean is not an entry price, a minimum standard or a bill that every couple receives.

The October 2024 Easy Weddings 2025 Industry Report drew on more than 4,000 couples planning weddings in 2025 or later and 800 wedding businesses. It is useful industry evidence, but it is a commercial-platform survey, not a population census like the ABS.

The 28-person invitation gap is economically significant. It affects catering, beverages, furniture, transport, stationery and venue requirements. It may have much less effect on the celebrant or photographer. A smaller wedding does not shrink every supplier category equally.

Smaller is not automatically socially worse. It can reduce debt, waste, stress and family politics. It can give a couple more time with the people who matter.

But there is a trade-off. A wedding is one of the few remaining occasions when families and communities publicly witness a commitment. Extreme privatisation can make marriage feel like a private lifestyle choice rather than a social institution.

The reported $7,860 gap between the original budget and expected spend should concern the industry, but the survey cannot tell us how much came from initial under-budgeting, price rises, scope changes or supplier practices. It would be unfair to assign the whole gap to businesses.

A newer Easy Weddings survey reported by ABC in June 2026 produced a different average of $38,252 and said 15% had chosen a smaller wedding. That is a different survey. The two figures should not be spliced into a clean price series.

ABC also reported that government registry weddings increased over three years by 553 in Victoria, 1,119 in New South Wales and 357 in Queensland. A separate report using Queensland BDM data put the state’s 2025 government-registry count at 3,082, about 13% of marriages. Those figures support a change in format, but they do not establish growth in private celebrant-led paperwork-only weddings.

The bigger lesson is that average spend can rise while event size falls. Supplier costs can increase, guest lists can shrink and high-spend respondents can pull up the mean at the same time. Higher nominal average spending is not proof of stronger real demand.

Longer engagements create another industry trap. Within the Easy Weddings sample, 30% said they were delaying to save, by an average of 12 months among that group. That suggests some near-term demand may be deferred, but it does not establish that the whole market is shrinking.

A pipeline can look healthy in the enquiry inbox while converting slowly into completed weddings. Businesses that confuse enquiries with near-term revenue may overestimate their market.

One more discrepancy is revealing. Easy Weddings forecast 55% of 2025 weddings would happen on Saturdays. ABS recorded 44.5% of 2025 wedding occurrences on Saturdays. One plausible explanation is that a planning platform disproportionately sees supplier-rich weddings, while the ABS also sees registry, paperwork-only, elopement and modest weekday weddings. The figures reveal a coverage or forecast gap; they do not prove its cause.

This is why the most resilient businesses will segment their services instead of discounting one oversized package. Couples are not all buying a cheaper version of the same wedding. They are choosing paperwork-only weddings, elopements, micro-weddings and larger celebrations as genuinely different products.

As weddings become smaller, I think the ceremony should become more important, not less. When there is less production surrounding the day, the words, promises and people carrying the ceremony have more weight.

Transparent pricing matters too. Hidden fees, unexplained mark-ups and constant upselling make the wedding industry look like an obstacle between couples and marriage. The wedding industry is not entitled to a fixed share of anyone’s savings. Its economic case rests on providing experiences and services that couples value.

That is also the useful lesson in Think Splendid’s international research about couples dismissing wedding professionals. Its global survey reported that 15% of respondents across budgets had dismissed at least one wedding professional, rising to 31% in the luxury segment and 27% in ultra-luxury. Those figures cover any wedding professional, not planners alone, and they are not Australian prevalence estimates. The industry warning is still useful: honest capacity, clear communication, transparent value and making clients feel important are competitive necessities.

Saturday is losing share, and Australia has several wedding seasons

Saturday remains the most popular wedding day, but it no longer represents most marriages.

The ABS daily table contains 117,501 marriages by date of occurrence in 2025. This differs from the 118,804 reference-year registration total because occurrence and registration are different measures.

Chart: Saturday remained the favourite wedding day in 2025, but accounted for fewer than half of recorded wedding occurrences. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2025.

Another 37.5% happened from Sunday to Thursday.

Saturday’s share in the published occurrence tables has fallen from 47.6% in 2023 to 45.6% in 2024 and 44.5% in 2025. Daily figures can be revised as late registrations arrive, but the direction is substantial.

A wider wedding week can be good economics. Venues can sell previously quiet days, couples may find more affordable options and suppliers can spread work. It can also weaken Saturday pricing power and change staffing patterns.

The most popular date was Saturday 25 October, with 2,035 marriages. The visually memorable Sunday 25 May recorded 726. Date numerology is media-friendly, but economically shallow. The deeper story is how marriages are redistributing across the week.

Monthly headlines can be shallow too. April 2025 occurrences fell 16.6% while May rose 21.7%. Combine the two months and the result was down by only 40 marriages, or 0.2%. Easter moved from late March in 2024 to late April in 2025. That is consistent with couples shifting around the holiday calendar; it is not proof of a demand change.

Australia does not have one national wedding season. Spring represented 32.7% of 2025 wedding occurrences nationally, but Tasmania peaked in March and the Northern Territory held 46.5% of its weddings in winter.

A national wedding business that applies Melbourne or Sydney seasonality to every state is misunderstanding Australia. Climate, tourism, school holidays and local culture create several wedding economies.

Victoria drove the decline, while South Australia and Tasmania rose

The state story is uneven:

Victoria registered 1,841 fewer marriages, accounting for about 90% of the net national fall of 2,040. The national totals imply that the other states and territories combined were down by about 200.

South Australia had the strongest annual rise. Western Australia softened slightly but remains the strongest six-year growth story, 13.3% above 2019.

Tasmania registered 2,405 marriages, almost exactly its 2019 count of 2,385. That recovers some of the ground in my analysis of Tasmania’s 2024 fall, although Tasmania’s share of the national market remains slightly below 2019.

State figures measure where a marriage was registered, not where the couple usually lives. They can include interstate and overseas residents marrying locally. They exclude Australian residents whose legal marriage takes place overseas.

That creates a destination-wedding blind spot.

In 2026 I am personally involved in more than 20 overseas wedding celebrations. For many of those couples, I solemnise the legal marriage in Australia before or after the trip. Those legal marriages are included in Australia’s count; the overseas celebration is not a second marriage and most of its event spending may occur elsewhere.

If an Australian couple legally marries in Italy or Greece, however, that marriage is absent from the ABS domestic registration series even if Australia recognises it. My guide to the legal catch for Australians marrying in Italy explains why some couples separate the legal marriage from the destination celebration.

Inbound destination weddings do the reverse. They can add Australian registrations and tourism spending without showing stronger marriage behaviour among local residents. That matters in Tasmania, where international couples form a meaningful part of the wedding clientele I see.

Weddings produce economic spillovers across hospitality, regional tourism, casual employment, transport, clothing, flowers and creative businesses. Australia still lacks a credible national dataset that measures the whole wedding economy. The ABS counts the legal act, not the event wrapped around it.

What the divorce figures actually say

Divorce rose in 2025, but the “41% divorce rate” is still bad maths

Australia granted 49,158 divorces in 2025, up 4.1%. The crude divorce rate rose from 2.1 to 2.2 per 1,000 people aged 16 and over.

That is a real annual increase. It is also below the 2019 rate of 2.4 and well below 3.3 in 2005.

“Divorce orders rose in 2025” and “the crude divorce rate is lower than it was 20 years ago” are both true.

Dividing 49,158 divorces by 118,804 marriages produces 41.4%. The arithmetic is correct. As a lifetime failure rate, it is statistically meaningless.

The divorces granted in 2025 mostly come from marriages formed in earlier years. The 2025 marriages have barely begun. It is the relationship equivalent of dividing this year’s deaths by this year’s births and calling the result life expectancy.

I have written at length about why the 50% divorce statistic is a myth. The annual ABS release cannot tell us what percentage of marriages begun in 2025 will eventually end.

Nor can it measure relationship quality. A lower divorce count is not automatically evidence of happier marriages. Financial pressure can keep unhappy couples together or delay the formal court process. Greater economic independence—including for women—may make leaving an unsafe or deeply unhappy marriage possible. That can be social progress even when it lifts the divorce count.

De facto separation is largely invisible in divorce orders. Australia can experience substantial relationship instability without a corresponding divorce because many couples never married.

The 2025 rise was an older-age divorce story

Divorce rates fell for men and women aged 25–34 and generally rose at older ages. For men, rates increased from age 40. For women, they increased from age 35.

Later-life separation can turn one household into two when there is less time to rebuild income, housing equity and superannuation. The later divorce order records that earlier rupture; it does not necessarily create the housing demand in the year the order is granted.

There are two defensible readings of older-age divorce. It may show people gaining the financial and social freedom to leave relationships they no longer want. It can also create serious housing and retirement insecurity.

Among divorces granted in 2025:

• the median duration to separation was 9.4 years; and
• the median duration to final divorce was 13.4 years.

Those are two separate medians. They describe marriages that appeared in the divorce data, not the durability of every Australian marriage.

That is an important statistical habit throughout this release: know who is in the denominator before turning a number into a story.

What this means for Australia

The good news, the bad news and the work ahead

Australia is better off in some ways:

• The number of registered weddings has proved resilient after a historic disruption.
• The latest five-year total is only 0.6% below the final five pre-COVID years.
• Marriage remains the dominant partnered status.
• Couples appear to have more freedom to choose civil, weekday, registry, paperwork-only, elopement, micro-wedding, destination and large-wedding formats.
• Smaller weddings can reduce debt, stress and waste.
• A wider wedding week can improve venue use and broaden affordability.
• Marriage equality has moved into an ordinary, stable part of Australian marriage.

Australia is worse off—or at least has reasons for concern—in other ways:

• The marriage rate per 1,000 people aged 16 and over remains below its pre-pandemic level.
• No age-specific marriage rate rose in 2025.
• Cost pressure may be delaying commitments that couples genuinely want to make.
• A 24% gap between desired and planned guests points to compressed community celebration within one large industry sample.
• Later-life separation can compound housing and retirement insecurity.
• The wedding industry still lacks representative national data on spending, guest counts, formats and supplier employment.
• ABS no longer routinely publishes enough detail to separate independent civil celebrants, government registries and religious ministers.

For a pro-marriage community, the answer is not to hide the lower rate. It is to remove unnecessary barriers, tell the truth about what marriage and weddings cost, and make the ceremony and commitment worth choosing.

For celebrants and wedding businesses, the answer is not to assume that 118,804 marriages equal 118,804 conventional Saturday weddings. We need products that fit genuinely different couples and formats, clearer pricing and a better understanding of local seasons.

For governments and the ABS, the policy request is straightforward: restore routine public reporting of who conducts Australia’s marriages, and build credible measures of the wedding economy around those legal events.

My read is that Australia has not fallen out of love with marriage. It has fallen out of love with one narrow, expensive and Saturday-heavy way of getting married.

The wedding market is resilient. The lower rate worries me. The opportunity is to make marriage more accessible, more meaningful and more connected to the communities that witness it.

Australian marriage statistics 2025 FAQ

How many marriages were registered in Australia in 2025?

Australia registered 118,804 marriages in 2025. That was 1.7% fewer than in 2024, 0.3% more than in 2023 and 4.4% more than in 2019.

Is marriage becoming less common in Australia?

In raw numbers, marriage registrations have returned to roughly their pre-pandemic scale. Relative to the population aged 16 and over, marriage is less common: the crude rate was 5.3 per 1,000 in 2025, compared with 5.6 in 2019.

What is the average age to get married in Australia?

The ABS publishes median rather than mean ages. In 2025 the median age at marriage was 32.7 for men and 31.2 for women.

What percentage of Australian marriages end in divorce?

The annual ABS release cannot supply a lifetime percentage. Dividing 2025 divorces by 2025 marriages compares different cohorts and is not a valid estimate. The 2025 annual crude divorce rate was 2.2 divorce orders per 1,000 people aged 16 and over.

How much does the average Australian wedding cost?

There is no official ABS wedding-cost figure. Easy Weddings reported an average expected cost of $35,315 in its October 2024 survey of couples planning 2025 and later weddings. A different, later Easy Weddings survey reported by ABC produced $38,252. Neither figure is a minimum price, a median or a census of every Australian wedding.

Can you get legally married in Australia without holding a full wedding?

Yes. A paperwork-only wedding and a large hosted wedding are different products. Couples still need to satisfy Australia’s legal marriage requirements, including using an authorised celebrant, giving the required notice and having two adult witnesses. A paperwork-only, celebrant-led wedding can cost about $700.

Data notes: National totals are marriages registered in the reference year. Daily, weekday, monthly and seasonal analysis uses 117,501 marriages by date of occurrence and will not sum to the 118,804 registration total. State data refer to jurisdiction of registration, not usual residence. ABS applies confidentiality adjustments to some cells, so displayed jurisdiction rows may not sum exactly to the national total. Industry-survey figures describe the named respondent samples and should not be treated as ABS population estimates. Calculations may differ slightly from displayed figures because published rates are rounded. At the release-day snapshot, the ABS key-statistics bullet said 49,148 divorces while the body, table and workbook said 49,158; this article uses 49,158. The narrative also said 79,987 marriages in 2020 while the official series and workbook said 78,987; this article uses 78,987.

Key sources: ABS 2025 release; ABS methodology; AIFS marriage facts; Easy Weddings 2025 Industry Report; ABC reporting on smaller weddings and registries.

Feature photo by Jason Corroto Photo for The Elopement Collective.