The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has recently released its annual statistics for Marriages and Divorces, Australia, 2018.
There were 119,188 marriages in Australia in 2018. In the first 12 months since the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Australia, same-sex marriages represented 5.5% of the total number of marriages in Australia.
The 6,538 same-sex marriages in 2018 has influenced some of the key statistics, including the median age at marriage, which recorded the greatest increase in more than a decade. The median age of grooms in same-sex relationships was 44.9 years and median age of brides in same-sex relationships was 39.3 years. The median age for grooms in heterosexual relationships was 32.1 years and 30.2 years for brides in heterosexual relationships.
There were 49,404 divorces in Australia in 2018, with the crude rate of divorce dropping from 2.7 divorces per 1,000 people in 1998, to 2.0 divorces per 1,000 people in 2018.
Other interesting statistics arising from the data include that 35% of the nation’s same-sex marriages occurred in NSW and the most popular day to be married in 2018 was Saturday 20 October.
