New ONS figures for England and Wales show 34.9% of adults have never married or formed a civil partnership, up from 32.6% ten years ago. The usual assumption is that they are living together instead. Most are not.
On 31 July the Office for National Statistics published its 2025 estimates of who in England and Wales is married, single, or living with a partner.1 Just over half of adults — 51.1% — were married or in a civil partnership. A decade earlier it was 52.3%. That is a slow drift, not a collapse.
The faster movement is at the other end. The share of adults who have never married or formed a civil partnership rose from 32.6% to 34.9%: roughly one in three. That is a rise of 2.3 percentage points, which simply means 2.3 more people in every hundred.
The obvious explanation is that couples are skipping the wedding and moving in together instead. That is happening — but it is the smaller half of the story. Adults living with a partner they had never married or civil-partnered rose from 9.8% to 10.8%, an extra one person per hundred.1
The rest of the increase is people who have never legally partnered and are not living with a partner at all. That group grew from 22.8% of adults to 24.1% — about one in four. It is the larger share of the change, and the part that usually goes unmentioned.
One thing this measure cannot tell you: living apart is not the same as being alone. The survey records who shares a household, not who is in a relationship. Couples who keep separate homes are counted here as not living together.
Cohabiting couples are now unremarkable, but they remain a modest slice of the adult population. In 2025, 62.1% of people aged 18 and over lived with a partner — about six in ten. Of all adults, 49.1% lived with a husband, wife or civil partner; 10.8% lived with a partner they had never married; and 2.2% were living with a partner after a divorce or the death of a spouse.1
Nor has marriage given way to divorce. On a Noodle News calculation from the published shares, adults who were divorced or widowed — including the civil partnership equivalents — fell from 15.1% to 14.0% over the decade. Marriage is not ending more often. It is starting less often.
ONS finds the sharpest shifts among people aged 25 to 34 and 45 to 69, where the share who have never legally partnered rose by between 4 and 7 percentage points.1 The bulletin does not print five-year age bands; that detail is published only in the accompanying spreadsheet.
A related figure from a separate ONS release: 28.7% of people aged 20 to 34 in the UK lived with a parent in 2025, against 25.4% in 2015.2 The two counts cover different populations, and neither explains the other.
These estimates come from Quarter 2 (April to June) of the Labour Force Survey, run by ONS, which achieved a sample of 33,235 households in 2025. ONS notes that lower survey response in recent years has increased uncertainty, though sample sizes are recovering.14 Margins of error are published in the datasets rather than the bulletin, so this piece cannot attach one to each figure. The 22.8% and 24.1% figures, and the 15.1% and 14.0% divorced-or-widowed figures, are Noodle News subtractions from percentages ONS had already rounded to one decimal place, so each could be out by about 0.1 points. Nothing here explains why people are marrying less: the data counts arrangements, not reasons. Five-year age-band shares — the cut this piece was commissioned to chart — are released only inside the ONS spreadsheet, which could not be retrieved in this build.