The Marriage and Divorce Data Compass

The National Center for Family & Marriage Research with the Center for Family & Demographic Research at Bowling Green State University present The Marriage and Divorce Data Compass, an archive of contextual data on the United States focusing on county-level administrative data of marriages and divorces in the United States. We provide researchers with data to examine geographic concentrations of marriage and divorce for over 3,000 counties in the U.S. spanning 143 years (available data fall between the years 1867 through 2019). Data can be used in combination with other county-level data sets to examine geographic variation or be merged with individual-level data sets as measures of social and community context.

Do you want to know if the data you are looking for is available? Check out the Data Compass Crosswalk. The Crosswalk is organized by year and indicates the marriage and divorce measures available as well as links to the location of the data files.

Getting Started

Select a dataset from the data menu below to view its description, access the data files, and other useful information.

Data Menu