New data from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the percentage of women who gave birth while unmarried has declined over the past decade. According to a report titled “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. This represents a decrease of 4.8 percentage points, or about 300,000 fewer unmarried women giving birth.
In 2023, four million women ages 15 to 50 gave birth within the last year. Of these, about 1.2 million were unmarried, and approximately 450,000 (35.5%) lived with an unmarried partner.
The report draws on data from the 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) and compares it to figures from a similar report based on the ACS from 2011.
From 2011 to 2023, every U.S. state and the District of Columbia either saw a decrease in the percentage of women with a recent birth who were unmarried or no statistically significant change.
Among teenagers ages 15 to 19 who had given birth in the past year, most—90.1%—were unmarried in 2023. The total number of births among unmarried women in this age group fell sharply during this period, dropping from over 216,000 in 2011 to about 82,500 in 2023.
Looking at education levels, nearly half (48.9%) of women with less than a high school education who had recently given birth were unmarried in 2023; for high school graduates or GED holders, the figure was similar at 47.9%. These rates are not significantly different from each other for that year but represent a decline for those without a high school diploma compared to their rate of being unmarried after giving birth in 2011 (57%).
Additionally, there was an increase in the proportion of recent mothers holding at least a bachelor’s degree—from 8.8% in 2011 to 11.4% in 2023.
Certain states reported higher-than-average percentages of recent births to unmarried women: Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia. States with lower-than-average rates included Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
For further details about fertility statistics collected by the Census Bureau visit their Fertility webpage at https://www.census.gov/topics/health/fertility.html.
