New York Has One of the Lowest Divorce Rates in the Country. It Also Has the Highest Never-Married Rate.
Let's start with the number that makes New York sound like it has this figured out.
New York consistently ranks among the three lowest states in the country for crude divorce rate, at roughly 2.2 to 2.5 divorces per 1,000 residents, according to CDC data — well below the national average, and a rate New York City and Ithaca specifically help pull down, since both post some of the lowest local divorce rates in the state. On its own, that's a number worth bragging about.
Sitting right next to it, in the same Census data, is the number that explains it. New York has the highest share of 30-to-49-year-olds who have never been married of any state in the country — more than one in three, according to a Census-based analysis reported by the New York Post. New York City's own figures push further: 38.61% of adults in the city are unmarried, and among women specifically, 36.3% have never married, per city marriage-demographic data. Every "worst city for dating" ranking that includes New York tells a version of the same story — the city has the largest population of singles of any major U.S. metro, and, according to at least one national dating-market study, the lowest rate of people actively searching for a relationship despite it.
You can't get divorced from a marriage that isn't happening. New York's flattering divorce rate isn't evidence the city is good at marriage. It's evidence that an unusually large share of New Yorkers aren't getting there — which is a very different achievement, and one the low-divorce headline actively obscures.
The mechanism is easier to find in New York than in almost any other city in this series, because it has a name and a dollar figure: the singles tax. New Yorkers who live alone pay an average of $20,100 more per year than they would splitting rent with a partner, the largest gap of any U.S. city, according to a StreetEasy and Zillow analysis reported by CNN. Cohabitating couples in New York save a combined $40,200 a year compared to living separately. Average rent in the city runs around $3,931 a month, 149% above the national average, according to Architectural Digest. Every year a New Yorker stays single past the point they might otherwise partner up isn't a neutral delay. It's a five-figure annual cost, in a city that already asks more of a single income than almost anywhere else in the country.
The gender-ratio explanation people usually reach for in New York turns out to be less useful than it sounds. The city's overall population does skew female, 53% to 47%, but analysis by NYC's own Economic Development Corporation found that among never-married singles specifically aged 20 to 34, the pattern flips — men slightly outnumber women, 742,400 to 729,500. The imbalance most people cite to explain New York dating difficulty doesn't actually hold in the age bracket doing most of the city's dating. What does hold, city-wide, is a cost structure that makes staying single measurably, continuously expensive, in a market layered on top of famously demanding finance, media, law, and consulting careers that leave, as more than one New York matchmaker has put it, "ambition first" as the default operating mode well into a person's thirties.
Put these pieces together and New York's low divorce rate stops looking like proof of a functional dating culture and starts looking like the predictable output of a city that makes reaching marriage unusually hard, in ways that have nothing to do with whether New Yorkers want it. A record-high never-married rate, a $20,100 annual penalty for staying single, and a young dating pool that's actually closer to gender-balanced than the popular narrative admits, all point in the same direction: New Yorkers aren't unusually bad at staying married. They're running into a structural, quantifiable set of costs — in money, time, and career pressure — well before marriage becomes a question their divorce statistics could ever answer.
None of this means New Yorkers have given up — the city's own marriage numbers reportedly saw their biggest single-year jump in the country in 2022, evidence that plenty of New Yorkers get there eventually, just later and against more resistance than most of the country. It means the state's celebrated low divorce rate was never really about marital stability. It's a byproduct of a five-figure annual cost that keeps rewriting, for a huge share of the city, when "eventually" arrives.