Detroit has landed at the top of a new national ranking measuring something other than crime rates or home values: the share of adults who have never walked down the aisle. According to a study released this year, 57.4% of Detroit adults have never been married, the highest rate among 115 large U.S. cities examined.
The figure comes from SmartAsset, which ranked cities with populations of at least 100,000 using marital-status data for residents age 15 and older. The study relied on the U.S. Census Bureau's 1-Year American Community Survey for 2024, and SmartAsset put it plainly: “Detroit claims the title of most-single city this year with 57.4% of adults never having married.” Beyond the never-married majority, another 23.0% of Detroit adults are currently married and 10.8% are divorced, per the same study.
Boston came in second nationally, with 56.6% of its population never having married, SmartAsset found. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Fremont, California, posted the nation's highest marriage rate, with 63.8% of adults married and just 26.4% never married. Nationally, the picture looks far more balanced: across the 115 large cities studied, an average of 40.1% of adults had found a partner while 42.5% remained single, according to the report.
Wayne County Leads Michigan's Youngest Singles
Detroit's ranking lines up with a broader statewide pattern. Wayne County recorded Michigan's highest rate of never-married young adults ages 25 to 34 in 2024, at 67%, according to an analysis by MLive. Statewide, almost 60% of Michigan residents in that same age bracket had never married as of 2024, based on the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey five-year average.
The outlet's data also revealed a gender split: 64% of Michigan men ages 25 to 34 had never married in 2024, compared with 53% of women in that age group. The trend has been building for decades. Marriage rates among young adults have fallen in every Michigan county since 2000, and only 30% of Michiganders ages 25 to 29 had been married at least once in 2024, down sharply from 54% in 2000, MLive reported.
Household composition has shifted alongside those numbers. The share of Michigan households headed by unmarried partners climbed from 2% in 2000 to 7% in 2024, according to the same analysis.
The Financial Weight of Staying Single
Being unmarried in Detroit carries a real cost, according to BridgeDetroit. Single individuals in metro Detroit spend nearly $11,000 more per year on living costs than a household with two incomes, the outlet reported, citing MIT's Living Wage Calculator. The outlet also pointed to transportation as a compounding obstacle, noting that one in three Detroiters do not have a car and that limited public transit may make it harder to even get to a date.
Weddings themselves add another barrier. The average wedding in Michigan cost $25,000 in 2021, BridgeDetroit reported, a sum that looms large against the roughly $23,000 the average Detroiter earned the following year. Those costs, combined with demographic trends, have fueled demand for relationship-focused services in the city — BridgeDetroit reported that one Detroit relationship therapist has 15 to 20 clients at a time who pay $200 for a 50-minute session.
The never-married surge isn't just a Detroit or Michigan phenomenon, though the city's numbers stand out nationally. The U.S. marriage rate has barely budged over the past decade, moving from 16.6 in 2012 to 16.7 in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. SmartAsset's data also found a gender imbalance among Detroit singles specifically, with 93.8 unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women ages 15 to 44 — a ratio close to Boston's 93.4.
Detroit's status as the nation's leader in never-married adults has drawn attention well beyond the data itself. As The Detroit News reported Saturday, experts say the prevalence of never-married residents can carry major effects for a community, shaping everything from local business opportunities to the services residents seek out as they navigate single life in a city where being unmarried is now the norm rather than the exception.
