Divorce rate in South Africa: Why ours looks lower than abroad
South Africa’s divorce rate sits far below America’s, but the real reason has less to do with happy marriages than you might think.
When I first heard South Africa’s divorce rate is lower than in many other countries, I was sceptical. The numbers bear it out, though. Stats SA’s latest marriages and divorces report puts the crude divorce rate at 39 per 100 000 people in 2024.
That works out to roughly 0.4 divorces per 1 000 residents. In the United States, the CDC’s provisional figures put the rate at 2.4 per 1 000, around six times higher. On paper, South Africa fares noticeably better than most Western nations.
But a low rate is not the same as strong marriages. The figure is climbing, with 24 202 divorces granted in 2024, up 8.9% on the year before, and women increasingly initiating divorce in South Africa. What sits behind the gap tells a more complicated story.
Divorce rate stays low because fewer South Africans marry
The simplest explanation is that you cannot divorce if you never married. Registered marriages and unions dropped to 102 373 in 2024, a 28.5% fall since 2015. Many couples live together long-term instead, and those breakups never reach a divorce court or official statistics.
Unregistered customary marriages skew the numbers
Customary marriages are also heavily undercounted. Only 2 634 were registered in 2024, a 25.5% drop, according to Business Tech. Stats SA only tracks registered unions, so when a marriage never reaches Home Affairs, its breakdown won’t appear in divorce data either.
Divorce rate differs sharply between groups
The national average also hides big differences. The white population group recorded 110 divorces per 100 000 in 2024, according to Family Laws South Africa, with other groups lower. A 2004 Social Work journal study found our rate relatively low but predicted a steady rise.
I’ve always joked that every country song is secretly a divorce song, and after digging through these figures, I’m laughing a little less. Having watched friends overseas navigate splits in far more formal systems, I suspect our low number says more about paperwork than happily ever after.