Countries With the Lowest Marriage Rate (UN)

Every country with a figure for marriage rate (un), ranked from lowest to highest. The top three are Sao Tome and Principe (1.09), United Kingdom (1.29) and Qatar (1.34). The middle country of the 116 has 4.56.

What this measures

Crude marriage rate, countries with complete registration, in marriages per 1,000 people. Source: United Nations Statistics Division. For this measure, no agreed better direction.

Marriages registered in the year per 1,000 people, from each country's civil register, as published in the UN Demographic Yearbook. Only countries whose register the UN rates as at least 90% complete are included. That leaves out most of Africa and much of South Asia, where many marriages are religious or customary and never registered, so the countries here lean toward places with strong record-keeping. Countries whose figures include visitors' weddings (Seychelles, about 30 per 1,000, and the Bahamas) are left out, since they show a wedding industry rather than how often residents marry. So is Equatorial Guinea, whose register is far too thin to be complete. Each yearly edition covers five years; where they overlap, the newest is used, since countries revise. Where both exist it matches the OECD series almost exactly (r = 0.998), so the two are treated as one measure, not two findings. The low points in 2020 are the pandemic. A few small island territories, such as the Turks and Caicos Islands (11 to 16 per 1,000), probably count visitors' weddings without saying so. No "better" direction is set: it describes how people live.

r is how closely two measures rise and fall together, from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together); 0 means no link.

The full ranking

Each country’s latest figure, from 2013–2024. The year beside each value says when it was measured.

More on marriage rate (un)

• Countries With the Highest Marriage Rate (UN)
• Marriage rate (UN) by country: trend over time and what it goes with

Related rankings

• Countries With the Lowest Religious Attendance
• Countries With the Lowest Religion Very Important
• Countries With the Lowest Frequent Prayer
• Countries With the Lowest Confidence in Religious Institutions
• Countries With the Lowest Divorce Rates
• Countries With the Lowest Births Outside Marriage
• Countries With the Lowest Women's Age at First Marriage
• Countries With the Lowest Marriage Rates

A ranking describes countries, not the people in them, and a high or low place does not by itself say why. All country rankings.