In 2024, Germany recorded just 349,200 marriages – the lowest number of newlywed couples in the country since the data series began in 1950, according to the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis). Out of 698,400 people who entered into a marriage that year, 79 % were first‑time spouses, meaning they had not been previously divorced or widowed. Most unions were heterosexual (about 97 %), while roughly 3 % were same‑sex marriages – statistics that have included same‑sex couples only since the legalization of “Marriage for All” in October 2017.
At the close of 2024, 34.6 million adults (age 18 and over) were married or in a civil partnership, representing almost half of the adult population. The proportion of married adults has been falling steadily. Thirty years earlier, in 1994, 39.2 million adults – or 60 % of the adult population – were married. The age group with the highest marriage rate was 65‑69 years; by the year’s end, more than two thirds (66 %) of the 5.3 million people in that bracket were married or in a registered partnership, totaling about 3.5 million.
During the same period, the number of unmarried adults – those not married, widowed, or divorced – climbed sharply. In 2024, 23.1 million adults were single, up from 16 million in 1994. The share of single adults among all 18‑plus residents grew from 24 % to roughly 33 % over those thirty years.
The age at which people marry has also increased. In 2024, the average age of first marriage was 32.9 years for women and 35.3 years for men, compared with 27.1 years for women and 29.4 years for men in 1994 – an increase of about six years. Women at divorce were on average 44.6 years old, men 47.6 years (in 2024); in 1994 those averages were 36.5 and 39.3, respectively, an increase of around eight years for both sexes. Marriages now last longer: the mean duration until divorce was 14.7 years in 2024 versus 12.0 years in 1994.
Divorces reached 129,300 in 2024 – a slight rise of 0.3 % compared with the previous year – yet this still represents the lowest number of divorces since German reunification.
On an international scale, Germany’s marriage rate in 2023 was 4.3 marriages per 1,000 residents, marginally above the European Union average of 4.0. The highest rates in the EU were in Romania (5.8), Latvia (5.6), and Hungary (5.2) per 1,000 residents, while the lowest were in Bulgaria (3.4), Italy (3.1), and Slovenia (3.0).
