Australian Marriage Statistics 2026: Every Number a Celebrant Needs

Reference year 2025. Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on 28 July 2026, with detail from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, the Attorney-General's Department and the Celebrant Institute. Every figure below is dated and sourced in full at the end of this page.

The headline numbers

Australia registered 118,804 marriages in 2025. That's down 1.7% on the year before, and the number means more with a bit of context around it.

Zoom out and the shape is a sharp V. 2020, the pandemic year, produced a floor of 78,989 marriages, the lowest in the current run of figures. Restrictions lifted, couples who'd delayed came through, and 2022 produced the post-COVID rebound peak: 127,161 marriages. Since then the number has come back down and settled into a narrower band, roughly in the high 110,000s to low 120,000s a year.

The rate per person tells the same story more precisely: 5.3 marriages per 1,000 people aged 16 and over in 2025, a little down from 5.5 in each of the two years before.

None of that points to a market that's booming or shrinking. It points to one that's settled below the 2022 rush and well clear of the 2020 low, and has held roughly there for a few years running. If you're planning next year's diary off this year's, that steadiness is the useful part.

The civil-celebrant takeover

In 1970, 88% of Australian marriages were performed by a minister of religion, according to the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS). Today that's almost reversed.

By 2001, civil celebrants already held 53.1% of the market. Civil celebrants have performed the majority of Australian marriages since at least 2001, and the share has only grown from there: 70.1% by 2011, moving from 78.0% in 2017 to 80.7% in 2021. By 2024, AIFS put the civil share at 83%, against 16% for ministers of religion.

Same-sex marriages have been performed almost entirely by civil celebrants from the start: 98.9% in 2018, 97.1% in 2019, 97.5% in 2020.

If you're a civil celebrant, this is simply the shape of the profession you're in. Not a growing niche inside a religious majority, but the mainstream, and has been for well over two decades. A couple who chooses a civil celebrant isn't doing anything unusual. They're doing what the clear majority of Australian couples already do.

When Australia marries

If you want to know when the phone rings, the answer is spring, and especially a Saturday in October.

October was 2025's busiest month, 14,037 weddings, with November close behind at 13,825. Between them, the two months carried 23.7% of the year's weddings. March is the other standout, a genuine autumn twin to the spring rush at 12,619. July is the quiet month, just 6,186.

Queensland's spring simply starts early: its busiest months in 2025 were September and October, with May a close third. The genuine exception is the Northern Territory, which peaked in July, in its dry season.

* A note on how these monthly figures are counted: they count weddings by when the ceremony actually happened, 117,501 of them across 2025, while the headline number at the top of this page counts registrations, 118,804. The two don't match exactly because a marriage can be registered a little after the ceremony, sometimes into the following year. Both are genuine ABS counts. They're just counting slightly different things.

Saturdays alone carried more than 52,000 of 2025's weddings.

The single busiest date of the year was Saturday 25 October, with 2,035 marriages. It wasn't the busiest date of the past twenty years, though: that honour belongs to 10/11/12, 10 November 2012, clearly a date couples chose on purpose, which drew 3,081 marriages.

For a celebrant, the practical reading is a calendar one. October and November are your bottleneck months: block them early, and price or prioritise accordingly. March is worth marketing harder if you want more autumn work without the spring scramble. July has genuine slack in it if you're chasing quieter, more flexible bookings. And if a couple wants a numerically neat date like 10/11/12, or a headline Saturday in late October, expect to be competing for your own calendar well before the year starts. A busier month means a tighter turnaround on paperwork too, not just ceremonies: the state-by-state Notice of Intended Marriage guide covers exactly what that means in each state.

Who marries

The median Australian who married in 2025 was a woman of 31.2 or a man of 32.7. Narrow that to people marrying for the first time and the ages drop a little further: 30.0 for women, 31.3 for men, on AIFS's 2024 figures.

More than half of everyone who married in 2025 was aged 25 to 34: 56.2% combined, with a modest gap between the genders, 54.3% of the men who married that year and 58.1% of the women.

Most Australian marriages are still a first marriage for both partners: 74% of 2024's marriages, per AIFS. And most couples have already been living together before the ceremony rather than after it: 81% of couples marrying in 2024 had moved in together first, again on AIFS's figures.

2025 also included 4,636 marriages between people of the same or non-binary gender, 3.9% of the total, with women (2,527) outnumbering men (1,849).

None of this is a script by itself, but it's a useful shape of the room you're actually writing ceremonies for: mostly first marriages, a couple who's very likely already sharing a home, most often in their late twenties or early thirties.

State by state

Here's where 2025's marriages were registered:

Scroll the table sideways →

Western Australia is worth calling out on its own: 13,208 marriages made it roughly 11% of the national market in 2025. Its busiest month was November (1,741 marriages), just ahead of October (1,570), counted by ceremony date as in the monthly figures above. It has also been steady, holding above 13,000 registrations in each of the last three years.

If you're weighing where to focus your marketing, or you work across a state border, this table is the honest starting point. The two biggest states carry the bulk of the national number, but Western Australia alone is a real slice of the market, not a rounding error.

The celebrant maths

There are over 10,000 Commonwealth-registered marriage celebrants in Australia, according to the Attorney-General's Department, the body that registers them. It's upfront about what that number hides: "Some perform many marriages each year, while others only perform a few or none."

Put a rough figure on the size of that gap. AIFS puts the civil-celebrant share of 2024's marriages at 83%. Multiply that against 2024's total of 120,844 marriages and civil celebrants performed roughly 100,300 weddings that year, a figure ABS and AIFS don't publish directly themselves, but a fair calculation from numbers they do. Spread that evenly across a register of 10,000-plus celebrants and it works out to an average of around 10 weddings per celebrant per year.

Read that average next to the department's own words above, and the real story isn't the average. It's the shape hiding underneath it: a genuine long tail, a relatively small group of celebrants doing the bulk of the ceremonies each year, and a large share doing a handful, or none at all.

If your own year doesn't look anything like "10 ceremonies," you're not an outlier, you're closer to the typical case than the average suggests. Whether your current tools and habits fit depends far more on where you actually sit on that tail than on any national average. The spreadsheets vs CRM comparison goes into that tipping point in more depth.

The numbers nobody publishes any more

Some of what's on this page got harder to find in 2026. Since 2022, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stopped publishing the split between civil celebrants and ministers of religion in its free release, along with the remarriage detail and the couples' country-of-birth breakdown that used to sit beside it. Want any of that straight from the ABS today? It comes through a paid data request, not the standard release.

The Celebrant Institute has tracked what that costs. Its own reporting puts the price of requesting that data directly from the ABS at "a minimum of $600," a figure that's theirs, not an official ABS price list.

The 83% figure earlier on this page exists because AIFS still does the work of estimating the civil and religious split each year. That's a genuine service to the industry, but it's one research body's annual estimate standing in for what used to be a standard part of the free public release.

A working celebrant should be able to see a number like that for free. It's a real part of why CelebrantCentral runs its own annual survey of Australian celebrants: not to replace the ABS, but to ask what the official release never has. How much of the job is ceremonies other than weddings. How celebrancy sits alongside other income. What celebrants actually think good software should cost. The full results, with the method and every limitation stated alongside them, are in the 2026 Australian Celebrant Survey.

The next wave, planned for 2027, will start carrying forward some of the specific questions the ABS itself used to ask and no longer publishes for free.

If you want a fuller, more current picture of how celebrants actually run their businesses than the official statistics give you, that survey is the place to start, and it costs nothing to read.