FOI reference: FOI-2025-2678
You asked
I would like to submit an FOI request for the latest ONS divorce data in England and Wales since it was last published in 2022 -- please could I have the following information:
- What regions of England and Wales have the highest / lowest divorce rates?
- What regions of England and Wales do marriages last the shortest amount of time?
- How many couples divorced in 2023 and in 2024?
- What was the average age of divorcees in 2023 and in 2024?
- What percentage of divorced couples in 2023 and in 2024 had children together?
We said
Thank you for your freedom of information request.
Divorce by region
Unfortunately, we do not hold divorce statistics by area of residence. Divorce data provided to us by the courts does not contain information on the area of residence of the parties. Since 2018, Family Court Statistics Quarterly published by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has included a file in CSV format containing applicant's area of usual residence. Information on the location of the court is also available in the collection. Court location does not accurately reflect where parties lived either before or after separation, and divorce courts were centralised in 2015 to 11 main divorce centres throughout England and Wales.
Divorce by age and children 2023 and 2024
The latest ONS divorce data in England and Wales was published on 22 February 2024 and relates to divorces granted in 2022 (see Table 1a in the 2022 edition of this dataset). The next release will report divorces granted in 2023 and a publication date will be announced on the ONS release calendar once available.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) publish information on the number of divorce applications and final orders granted on a quarterly basis in Family court statistics Quarterly. The latest data available is for July-September 2024.
Age at divorce was published until the 2019 data year. The latest figures available therefore relate to 2019 and can be found in the 2019 edition of this dataset (see Tables 2a and 2b for mean age at divorce). Please see the Information tab for details of the higher levels of missingness in age at divorce data for years 2014 to 2019. From 2020, information about age was no longer collected during the divorce process.
Since 2014, it has not been mandatory for couples divorcing to provide information on children. The latest published figures available on divorced couples with children can be found in the 2014 edition of this dataset (see Table 8) .
However, the Census 2021 dataset attached details marital status by dependent children in household and their age. This has been produced using the create a custom dataset tool and a filter applied to show only those that are divorced.