US States With The Highest Marriage Rates

Here is the strange thing about America's marriage-rate map: the states at the very top are not the most romantic, just the most convenient places to say "I do." Federal statisticians count marriages by where the wedding happens, not where the couple lives, so any state that hosts a flood of out-of-town and even overseas ceremonies rockets up the chart. That single quirk explains most of the leaderboard. Nationally, Americans marry at a rate of about 6.2 per 1,000 people, roughly two million weddings a year, and that figure has been drifting down for a generation as couples wait longer to commit. The median first-time bride is now 28.6 and the groom 30.2, both up from the low 20s in the 1960s. Yet the gap between states is enormous. Nevada tops the list at 24.6 marriages per 1,000 residents, while Louisiana sits at just 3.7, and the reasons behind those extremes have more to do with paperwork and geography than with love.

Why Nevada and Hawaii Run Away With It

Nevada is not just first. It is lapping the field. At 24.6 marriages per 1,000 residents in 2023, Nevada roughly doubles the runner-up and quadruples the national average. The engine is Las Vegas, where couples can pick up a license with no waiting period and no blood test, then marry minutes later at a 24-hour chapel. The vast majority of those newlyweds live somewhere else, but every ceremony is credited to Nevada. Here is the kicker: even this towering number is a faded version of its old self. Nevada's rate hit a staggering 99 per 1,000 in 1990 and was still 38 as recently as 2010. The Vegas wedding machine has been winding down for three decades and is somehow still winning by a mile.

Hawaii runs the same play with better scenery. Its 12.5 rate is fueled by couples who fly in to trade vows on a beach at sunset, not by locals heading to the county office. Hawaii has slipped too, down from more than 22 in the mid-2000s, but a busy destination-wedding industry keeps it locked in second place.

Utah's Video-Call Wedding Boom

Utah muscled into third place by inventing a new kind of wedding. Since January 2020, Utah's Utah County has let couples apply for a marriage license entirely online and hold the ceremony over video chat, with the officiant sitting in Utah and the couple free to be almost anywhere on the planet. Word traveled fast. Thousands of international couples have married this way, and in one recent year roughly a third of the remote ceremonies involved at least one Israeli spouse. Every one of those webcam weddings counts toward Utah's total, lifting its rate to 11.2, up from around 8 before the pandemic. It is the only state where you can get legally married without ever setting foot inside it.

Montana, DC, and the Small-Population Swing

After the headline-grabbers come a few places that ride a different force entirely: size. Montana ranks fourth at 9.2, and the District of Columbia fifth at 8.6, yet neither has a Las Vegas or a video-call loophole. Both are simply small enough that a modest number of extra weddings moves the needle hard. Montana's rate jumped during the pandemic, cresting at 11.0 in 2021 before easing back, the kind of swing you rarely see in a populous state. Vermont (7.2) and Alaska (6.4) show the same volatility for the same reason: when the population is small, the marriage rate becomes a jumpier number.

The Marry-Young Belt

Zoom out to the next tier and a clear band appears across the South and the Mountain West. Arkansas and Colorado (both 7.8), Tennessee (7.3), Idaho (7.0), and Alabama (6.9) all sit comfortably above the national line. These are also the places where people marry youngest. The typical first-time bride in Utah is just 25.2, and the median groom in Arkansas marries at 27.2, several years ahead of his peers in the Northeast. Deep religious roots, a cultural head start on settling down, and a handful of genuine draws, such as the glass-walled Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, all nudge the totals higher. Marrying young carries a well-documented catch, though: several of these same states also report the nation's highest divorce rates.

Where Fewer Couples Say I Do

At the bottom of the table, the story flips. Louisiana posts the country's lowest rate at 3.7, trailed by New Mexico and Delaware (both 4.7) and a cluster of industrial Midwest and Northeast states: Minnesota (4.8), then Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin all hovering around 5.0. These are not places where romance goes to die. They are places where couples marry later, cohabit longer, and rarely draw wedding tourists from other states. The pattern tracks a national shift: the share of American adults who are married has slid to around half, and more people are living together, marrying in their thirties, or skipping the paperwork altogether. Set the map beside a plain ranking of state populations and you will notice the least-married states are often the big, urban, later-marrying ones.

Marriage Rates in All 50 States and DC

Here is the full ranking for 2023, the most recent year of complete federal data, measured as marriages per 1,000 residents by state of occurrence.

Source: CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System, 2023 (provisional). Rates count marriages by the state where they take place, not where the couple resides, which is why destination and online-wedding states rank so high. California figures include nonlicensed marriages that were later registered. States sharing a rate share a rank.

What the Rankings Really Measure

The marriage-rate map is less a heat map of American love than a map of where it is easy, cheap, or scenic to hold a wedding. Nevada and Hawaii import their couples, Utah marries them by webcam, and the South and Mountain West simply marry younger. Strip away the destination effect and most states bunch tightly between 5 and 7 per 1,000, a reminder that the real national story is not which state is winning the race to the altar, but that Americans everywhere are marrying a little less, and a little later, than they used to.