The percentage of women who gave birth while unmarried in the United States has declined over the past decade, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The report, titled Social and Economic Characteristics of Currently Unmarried Women With a Recent Birth: 2023, found that 30.9% of women with a recent birth were unmarried in 2023, compared to 35.7% in 2011.
In raw numbers, this change represents a drop from under 1.5 million unmarried women giving birth in 2011 to about 1.2 million in 2023. Of those unmarried mothers in 2023, approximately 450,000 (or 35.5%) lived with an unmarried partner.
The analysis uses data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for both years and compares social and economic factors among these women.
From 2011 to 2023, every state and the District of Columbia either saw a decrease or no statistically significant change in the share of births to unmarried women.
Teenage mothers remained much more likely to be unmarried; in 2023, about nine out of ten women ages 15 to 19 who had given birth were not married. However, the number of births among this age group fell sharply—from over 216,000 in 2011 to just over 82,000 by last year.
Educational attainment was another factor highlighted by the report. In both years studied, nearly half of all recent mothers with less than a high school diploma or only a high school degree were unmarried at the time they gave birth. However, there was a notable decline among those without a high school diploma: from roughly six out of ten being unmarried in 2011 down to just under half by last year.
Additionally, more mothers who recently gave birth held bachelor’s degrees than before—11.4% did so in 2023 compared with only about nine percent (8.8%) twelve years earlier.
State-by-state differences also emerged:
– Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia reported higher percentages than the national average.
– Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin reported lower-than-average percentages.
For additional details on fertility statistics nationwide visit the Census Bureau’s Fertility webpage.
