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There were 24,284 marriages in Scotland in 2021, an increase of around 12,300 marriages when compared with the previous year when there were 11,986 marriages, the fewest number of marriages in the provided time period. All marriages before 2014 were for opposite-sex marriages, with same-sex marriage first made legal in Scotland on December 16, 2014 following the Marriage and Civil Partnership Act. During this time period, the year with the most marriages was 1940, when there were over 53,500 marriages.

Almost half of Scots married

In 2018, 47 percent of Scots were either married or in a civil partnership, with a further 37 percent of people being single. Divorced and widowed Scots made up ten and seven percent of the population respectively. For Scots who were married, 32 percent were aged between 45 and 59 with the next most common age group being those aged between 60 and 74 at 28 percent of married people. During the same year, ten percent of Scots were divorced, with the overall number of divorces in Scotland generally falling since 2006 when there were 13,012.

Marriage trends in the rest of the UK

For the whole of the United Kingdom, there were 253,112 marriages in 2019, compared with 270,286 in 2018. In the same year, the average age at marriage in England and Wales was 39.7 years for men marrying women, 37.3 years for women marrying men, 40.8 years for men marrying men, and 37.4 for women marrying women. Like in Scotland, the overall number of divorces in the UK has been declining since the mid-2000s, with 112,182 in 2020, compared with 166,669 in 2004. There were just under 100,900 marriages in the UK in 2020, a figure distorted by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that year.