Divorce rate in Czechia 1993-2023

The total divorce rate in Czechia fluctuated in the observed period. While in 1993, it amounted to 36.2 percent, this figure increased to 50 percent in 2010 before dropping to 37.1 percent in 2023.

Does a lower divorce rate mean a happy marriage?

The total divorce rate indicates the proportion of marriages that would have ended in divorce if the divorce rate intensity of a given year had been maintained. This rate has declined since the 2010s, with a single increase in 2017. This coincides with the number of divorces in Czechia, which has decreased since 2010, with only a rise in 2013 and 2017. The decline in divorce numbers has been very prominent recently, as they have reached record-low figures since 2020.
However, this does not necessarily mean that people stay happily married. On the contrary, Czechia’s marital status figures indicate that the married population's share has gradually declined since 2010. This development has co-occurred with the growing share of divorced and single people. Rather than get married, people live together as unmarried partners and wait, or they do not intend to get married at all as the traditionalist social pressure to marry at all costs is much lower than decades ago.

Marry later, divorce later

Czechs tend to get married much later than 30 years ago. In 1993, the mean age of men at first marriage was 25.4 years, while for women, this figure amounted to 23.2 years. However, the age of first marriage increased over the years, with both genders getting married around seven years later in their lives as of 2022. This also corresponds with the mean duration of marriage at divorce. In 1993, people were married for around 10 years before divorcing, but this figure also increased by more than three years, meaning people stay married for longer before getting a divorce.