Australia's Divorce Rate Just Rose for the First Time Since Covid. Melbourne Is Driving the Opposite Number.

Let's start with the number that broke a run.

Australia's divorce rate ticked up to 2.2 per 1,000 people in 2025, the first increase since the pandemic-era spike of 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. It's a small move, and the long-term trend is still sharply down — the rate was 3.3 as recently as 2005 — but after years of steady decline, it's worth noting when the line finally bends the other way.

It's also, on its own, the wrong number to explain what's actually happening in Melbourne.

Because in the same 2025 release, one detail stands out from the state-by-state breakdown: Victoria recorded the sharpest fall in marriages of any Australian state, down 5.7%, according to ABS data — well ahead of the declines in Queensland, Western Australia, and the ACT. Nationally, marriages fell 1.7% in 2025. In Victoria, they fell more than three times as fast. Whatever is happening to relationships in Melbourne, it isn't the same story the national divorce number tells. It's happening earlier — at the point where people would otherwise be getting married in the first place.

The obvious place to look is the one every Melburnian already complains about: housing.

Melbourne's rental vacancy rate hovered between 1.1% and 1.6% through late 2024 and into 2025, according to PropTrack data — among the lowest in decades, and low enough that property managers report receiving 20 to 30 applications for a single listing, compared to low single digits before the pandemic. Total rental listings fell nearly 20% year-over-year at one point, the worst decline PropTrack has recorded since 2003. For anyone trying to move in with a partner, upgrade from a share house, or simply find a stable base to build a relationship from, that's not a backdrop — it's a direct obstacle standing between dating and the next stage most couples would otherwise take for granted.

There's a second, less obvious driver buried in the same housing data. Industry analysis from the Property Council of Australia found that one of the biggest contributors to the current rental squeeze isn't international students, who make up only about 4% of the national rental market — it's the rise of smaller, solo-person households. More Melburnians living alone means more separate rental applications competing for the same limited housing stock, which tightens the market further for everyone, including the couples trying to move in together and get off it.

Layer in Melbourne's specific pandemic history and the picture sharpens further. The city endured the longest cumulative Covid lockdowns of any city in the world — an extended stretch where an entire cohort of Melburnians in their prime dating years lost the ordinary, low-stakes ways people meet: through work, through friends of friends, through simply going out. That disruption didn't reverse the moment restrictions lifted. It compounded with a housing market that was already tightening, so the generation that lost its normal path to meeting someone came back to a city where actually building a life with that person, once found, got harder at almost the same time.

Put these threads together and Victoria's marriage decline looks less like a shift in what Melburnians want and more like a bottleneck at every stage of the process. Fewer easy ways to meet people after years of lockdown. A rental market so tight that moving in together is a genuine financial and logistical hurdle rather than a natural next step. And a broader housing crisis that keeps growing in part because more people are living — and staying — single, which then makes the market tighter for the very people trying not to.

None of this means Melburnians have given up on partnering off. It means the city's housing math and its post-lockdown dating math are pulling in the same direction at once, and the marriage numbers are the first place that's showing up in the data. The national divorce rate ticking up says something about marriages that already exist. Victoria's marriage rate falling three times faster than the rest of the country says something more specific: fewer of those marriages are getting the chance to happen at all.