Cohabitations

Data on Households, families and people taken from the 2011 General Lifestyle Survey on how the composition of households and families has changed over the last 40 years.

This report analyses the characteristics of people who are cohabiting with a partner.

The article presents an overview of trends in cohabitation and marriage in Britain over several decades, using a consistent set of retrospective histories from the General Household Survey 1979–2007. Time-trends are presented, for men and women, of: the experience of different types of partnership by specified ages, the frequency of premarital cohabitation, the average time spent in different types of partnership, the timing of life course transitions, and the outcome of cohabitation and marriage at the fifth and tenth anniversaries.

This article summarises mid-2007 cohabitation estimates produced for England and Wales and compares these with estimates made for previous years. Over the last fifteen years there has been a rise in the number of cohabiting adults in England and Wales. Previous estimates indicate that there were 2.7 million cohabiting adults in 1992 (6 per cent of the population over 16-years-old). In 2007 it is estimated that the number of cohabiting adults had increased to 4.5 million (10 per cent of the population over 16-years-old). Cohabitation trends provide evidence to suggest that cohabitation will continue to rise for never married adults (and therefore overall), particularly at older ages. There is also evidence suggesting an end to historic increases in cohabitation levels for never married adults under 30-years-old.

No. 136, Summer 2009