Almost half of the Spanish population will not get married if current trends continue. This is one of the conclusions of the report Collapse and Recovery of the Family, prepared by the CEU-CEFAS center under the direction of Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe, Head of Social Studies and Analysis, based on data from the INE and its own estimates.
Fewer and later marriages
The first-marriage indicator —the proportion of people who would marry before the age of 60 under current patterns— fell to 0.48 in 2024, compared to 0.99 in 1976. Among Spaniards, excluding foreigners, the figure is 0.52.
The average age at first marriage is now 37.3 years for men and 35.1 for women, about eleven years older than half a century ago. In addition, around half of marriages end in dissolution, and more than one in three break up before reaching 20 years.
No children and no grandchildren
According to the report, about four out of ten women of childbearing age could remain childless, and an even greater proportion would have no grandchildren. Four or five decades ago, less than 10% of women ended their fertile years without descendants.
Women born in Spain have gone from having an average of 2.77 children in 1976 to 1.07 in 2024, far from the 2.1 needed for generational replacement. Single-person households, meanwhile, have risen from around 660,000 (7.5%) at the end of the 1970s to about 5.65 million (28.5%) in April 2026.
A problem that cannot be sliced up
For Macarrón, “fertility, marriage and divorce cannot be analyzed separately.” The report calls for measures that favor more stable, fertile and supported families.
The study is presented days after the conclusion of the Vatican summit on the ten years of Amoris laetitia, focused precisely on the crisis of marriage and the family.