The U.S. Census Bureau has released a new report showing that the percentage of women who gave birth while unmarried declined over the past decade. According to the report, Social and Economic Characteristics of Currently Unmarried Women With a Recent Birth: 2023, 30.9% of women with a recent birth were unmarried in 2023, down from 35.7% in 2011.
In total, four million women ages 15 to 50 gave birth in the last year. Of these, about 1.2 million were unmarried, and roughly 450,000 (35.5%) lived with an unmarried partner.
The analysis uses data from the 2023 American Community Survey and compares it to figures from 2011 when possible. The findings indicate that between 2011 and 2023, either the share of women with a recent birth who were unmarried decreased or there was no statistically significant change across all U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
Teen births among unmarried women also saw notable changes. In 2023, most women ages 15 to 19 who had given birth in the last year—90.1%—were unmarried; however, this group’s size dropped by more than half compared to a decade earlier (from over 216,000 in 2011 to about 82,500 in 2023).
Educational attainment showed some differences as well. Nearly half of women with less than a high school education (48.9%) or only a high school diploma or GED (47.9%) who recently gave birth were unmarried in 2023; these rates are not significantly different from each other for that year but represent declines for those without a high school diploma since 2011.
Additionally, more mothers with recent births held bachelor’s degrees in 2023 than in previous years—11.4%, up from 8.8% in 2011.
Geographically, states such as Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia reported higher-than-average percentages of recent births to unmarried women compared to national figures.
Meanwhile Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire,New Jersey, New York,North Dakota, South Dakota,Utah, Virginia,Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin had lower-than-average percentages.
For additional details on fertility statistics nationwide visit the Census Bureau’s Fertility webpage.
