Twenty years after Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, and a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling extended marriage equality nationwide in 2015, a key question lingers: do same-sex marriages last as long as marriages between men and women?

So far, the best available evidence suggests that divorce rates for same-sex and different-sex couples in the United States are remarkably similar.

Before nationwide legalization, researchers had to rely on “early-adopter” states. A 2014 study from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute examined administrative records from New Hampshire and Vermont, two of the first states to allow same-sex marriage. It found that same-sex couples ended their marriages at an average rate of 1.1% per year, while the broader U.S. divorce rate for different-sex couples was about 2% per year over the same period. When civil unions and domestic partnerships in several other states were added, the overall annual dissolution rate for legally recognized same-sex relationships was still only 1.6%, modestly below the divorce rate among different-sex married couples. 

Those early numbers reflected a relatively small group of couples in a handful of states. After Obergefell, the picture broadened dramatically. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) now directly identifies same-sex and opposite-sex married couples and has tracked same-sex couple households since the mid-2000s. By June 2015 there were an estimated 380,000 married same-sex couples nationwide; by June 2025 that figure had grown to roughly 823,000, more than doubling in a decade. 

To estimate how many of those marriages have ended, a 2025 Williams Institute analysis of the economic impact of marriage equality applied the national “refined divorce rate” (divorces per 1,000 married women) to same-sex couples. The report concluded that “prior research… indicates that the divorce rates for same-sex couples overall and different-sex couples are similar,” and cited a comprehensive review finding that dissolution rates for married same-sex couples are “indistinguishable” from those for different-sex couples. 

Meanwhile, overall U.S. divorce has been trending downward for all marriages. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the crude divorce rate fell from 4.0 divorces per 1,000 people in 2000 to 2.4 per 1,000 in 2023 (based on data from the 45 states that report). That broad decline provides the backdrop for both same-sex and different-sex couples.

One nuance emerging from U.S. and international research is that gender within same-sex couples matters. Studies in other countries, such as a recent Finnish analysis, have found higher 10-year divorce rates among female–female couples than among male–male or different-sex couples, although those findings come from a different legal and social context. U.S. demographers note similar patterns in some datasets but emphasize that sample sizes are still small and long-term trends are not yet firmly established.

Bobby Blair is an LGBTQ media pioneer and leader known for his philanthropic work on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. A Florida native, he lives in Fort Lauderdale with his longtime partner, Brian Neal. Blair was inducted into the GLBT Hall of Fame in 2015.