Divorce Statistics · England & Wales · 2026

The gap most people never see coming

A final order legally ends a marriage. It does not divide anything. To settle who keeps the house, the savings and the pensions, and to close the door on future claims, a couple needs a separate financial order approved by the court. Yet in every year on record, most divorces finish without one.

In 2025 there were around 47,800 financial remedy applications against roughly 110,000 divorce applications. Even allowing that some couples have little to divide, it means well over half of divorcing couples never obtain a binding financial order. Without one, an ex-partner can bring a financial claim years, sometimes decades, after the divorce is finalised.

Divorce is getting slower, not faster

No-fault divorce arrived in April 2022 promising a simpler process. The data tells a more complicated story. The typical divorce now takes 42 weeks from application to final order, the longest since records began and up from 29 weeks a decade earlier.

A large part of the increase is by design. The 2022 law introduced a mandatory 20-week reflection period between the start of proceedings and the conditional order, which lengthens every case. Court volumes and the time taken to resolve finances and child arrangements add to the wait.

Couples are divorcing later in the marriage

The marriages that ended in divorce in 2023 had lasted a median of 12.7 years, among the longest ever recorded. Across recent decades the figure has climbed steadily, as people marry later and stay married longer before separating.

One older pattern still holds. The single most common length of marriage at divorce is seven years, the closest thing the data has to the proverbial seven-year itch.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Divorces in England and Wales 2023 (published July 2025). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

More couples are divorcing together

No-fault divorce also let couples apply jointly for the first time, rather than one person filing against the other. The option is being taken up more each year. Joint applications have risen from around 1 in 5 divorces in 2022 to 1 in 4 in 2025.

It points to a quieter, less adversarial approach to ending a marriage. A joint application will not suit every couple, particularly where communication has broken down, but for those who agree the marriage is over it can make the process feel more balanced.

About this study

The divorce statistics on this page are drawn entirely from official sources for England and Wales, analysed by Osbourne Pinner. Nothing here is modelled or estimated by us. Our aim is to turn the raw divorce statistics published by the courts and the ONS into something clear and useful for anyone going through, or thinking about, a divorce.