According to the most recent divorce statistics, the divorce rates in the U.S. and Florida are moving in the opposite direction. Florida is seeing a decrease in divorces while the U.S. as a whole is experiencing an increase. Surprisingly, both rates were at 3.0 divorces per 1,000 people in 2020, but the U.S. rate has increased from 2.3 per 1,000 in 2016 while Florida’s rate has decreased from 3.9 per 1,000. What seems to be happening?
Age of Population
In general, Florida’s residents are older than the average age of the U.S. population. In fact, in 2022, the average age in the U.S. was 38.5 years old and the average age in Florida was 42 years old. This might not seem like a huge gap, but when you consider the populations of the country and the state, it takes a lot of people to move the average up or down. This means that there is a significant older population in Florida compared to the rest of the U.S.
Despite the fact that the divorce rate among people over the age of 50 is rising and has been for several years, it’s still lower than the rate for people under age 50. When people retire and move to Florida, they often do so as couples who are intent on living the rest of their lives with each other. Certainly, that is the intention of everyone who gets married, but when older people have been married for decades, they tend to stick it out.
2020 Numbers Are Skewed
As with many other statistics, 2020 isn’t a great year for divorce rate comparisons. The pandemic interfered with numerous trends, including the divorce rate trend. In Florida’s case, the number dropped from 3.5 divorces per 1,000 in 2019 to 3.0 per 1,000 in 2020. In the three previous years, that rate only dropped by 0.1 per 1,000. What this means is that Florida’s divorce rate may not be as low as it seems at first glance and instead is probably somewhere between 3.5 and 3.3 per 1,000.
Additionally, it was more difficult for couples to access divorce services in 2020, which means those who were planning to divorce that year may have waited until things opened up a bit in 2021. This would mean that there would be an expected increase in divorces in Florida in 2021 and that the actual divorce rate may not level out until 2022.
The U.S. divorce rate, on the other hand, only went up by 0.1 to 3.0 per 1,000 in 2020 from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2019. Since the population is much higher in the U.S. than in Florida, it’s more difficult to move these numbers, so the uptick does represent a lot of divorces. And, as with Florida, divorce services in many states were not available for a large portion of the year. Unfortunately, this means that the national divorce rate could be higher than the numbers state.
Conclusion
The overarching trend for divorce in Florida is encouraging, but we can’t get too excited until the rates from more “normal” years are published. Still, it’s better than where the rest of the nation appears headed.