live estimate
people marrying right now
10,304people
modelled estimate · updated every second · nothing here is actually being counted
marrying since you opened this page
0
people marrying every day
247,284
weddings starting every second
3
by the numbers
weddings started
3
weddings per second
Are you getting married right now?
Nobody is counting the world. We can count you, though.
confirmed weddings today0 people
not right now0 people
See what's happening in your country
We only use your location to work out your country. We don't store your address.
by country — right now
| country | local time | awake | people |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 08:41 | 85% | 1,499 |
| India | 06:11 | 25% | 459 |
| United States | 19:41 | 90% | 386 |
| Indonesia | 07:41 | 60% | 215 |
| Brazil | 21:41 | 74% | 198 |
| Mexico | 18:41 | 92% | 152 |
| Japan | 09:41 | 93% | 144 |
| Philippines | 08:41 | 85% | 124 |
| Vietnam | 07:41 | 60% | 76 |
| Colombia | 19:41 | 90% | 60 |
How this works (the honest bit).
Marriage is sourced rather than guessed: the United Nations puts the crude marriage rate at roughly 5.5 marriages per 1,000 people per year worldwide, though it is falling almost everywhere and varies widely between countries. A ceremony runs about an hour, and each wedding involves two people, so about 120,000 weddings - a quarter of a million people - get married on a typical day, and roughly ten thousand are somewhere inside their ceremony at this moment. The figure is small, and it is meant to be. Marriage is one of the few things on this network that happens once in a life rather than many times in a day. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.
Why are people marrying later?
The age at first marriage has risen almost everywhere over the same period in which rates have fallen. Both trends run in the same direction for the same reasons.
- Women working changed the arithmetic. Where women have independent earning capacity, marriage is no longer the main route to material security. That removes a reason to marry early, and it does not replace it with a reason to marry soon.
- Education takes longer. Extended education delays the point at which people are established in work and housing. Marriage tends to follow that establishment rather than precede it.
- The costs moved onto individuals. Housing and childcare costs relative to income have risen in many places, making the economic case for a household of two stronger but also making the threshold for feeling ready higher.
- Divorce made the decision reversible and consequential. Where divorce is available, marrying early carries a risk that a previous generation did not face in the same way. Later marriage correlates with lower divorce risk, which is at least partly selection rather than cause.
This is a description of the trend, not an argument about it. Later and less often is what the statistics show across most regions, even where the absolute levels differ widely.
UN marriage and divorce statistics, plus work on female labour-force participation and marriage timing. The direction is consistent even where levels differ.