Pew Research Center — A record-high share of 40-year-olds have never been married

What the study found

A Pew Research Center analysis of decennial census and American Community Survey data examined how many Americans reach age 40 without ever marrying. It found that, as of 2021, a quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married, up from 20 per cent in 2010 and just 6 per cent in 1980, with a higher share of men than women never married. ^[1]

25 per cent of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married

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The analysis also reported that among 40-year-olds who had not married by 2001, about one in four had done so by age 60, and that in 2022, 22 per cent of never-married adults aged 40 to 44 were cohabiting. ^[1]

Why it matters here

This dataset is often invoked in discussions of the so-called 80/20 rule of dating — the idea that a small minority of men receive most women's romantic attention while many men are left out. The rising share of adults who reach 40 without marrying is sometimes read as support for that framing. On its own, however, the figure only describes trends in marriage timing and never-married rates; it does not measure how romantic or sexual attention is distributed across individuals, and the same data show that many never-married adults are cohabiting rather than uncoupled. It therefore sets a factual baseline against which the stronger causal claim has to be weighed.