Singapore’s official divorce statistics come from one place: the Department of Statistics, which publishes an annual report called Statistics on Marriages and Divorces on singstat.gov.sg. It is free, it is updated every year, and it is the source that news articles, policy papers and MSF publications ultimately draw on. If you want the current divorce rate, that is where to go, and this page will not quote a figure at you, because any number written here would be out of date before you read it.
What is more useful is knowing how to read it. The phrase “divorce rate” gets used for at least three different measures that produce very different impressions of the same reality, and most of the confusion in public discussion comes from mixing them up.
Where the official numbers come from
Divorce data in Singapore is administrative, not survey-based. Every civil divorce is recorded when the Family Justice Courts grant a dissolution under the Women’s Charter, and every Muslim divorce is recorded through the Syariah Court under the Administration of Muslim Law Act. SingStat compiles those records into the annual release.
Because it is administrative data, it is close to complete: this is not a sample with a margin of error. But it counts legal events, not relationships. A couple who separated eight years ago and only formalised it last year appears in last year’s figures. A couple who have lived apart for a decade without ever filing appears nowhere at all. That gap between when marriages end in practice and when they end on paper is invisible in the data, and it is larger than most people assume.
MSF also publishes analysis and family-related statistics that draw on the same underlying records, often with more commentary on what the trends mean for policy. Between the two, everything reliable in the public domain is available for free.
The three measures people call “the divorce rate”
Getting these straight is most of the work.
| Measure | What it counts | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|
| Number of dissolutions | Total divorces and annulments granted in a year, civil and Muslim | Workload and volume; poor for comparing across years or countries |
| General divorce rate | Divorces per 1,000 married resident males and per 1,000 married resident females | The standard measure; controls for how many people are married |
| Age-specific divorce rate | Divorces per 1,000 married residents within an age band | Seeing which age groups drive a change |
The raw count is the one most often quoted and the least informative. If the married population grows, the number of divorces can rise while the underlying propensity to divorce falls. The rate per 1,000 married persons corrects for that, which is why SingStat leads with it.
Note that the general divorce rate is reported separately for men and women. The two figures differ because the married male and married female resident populations are not the same size, largely due to marriages involving non-resident spouses. Neither number is “the” rate: they are two views of the same events.
The measure that does not exist
What almost everyone actually wants is “what percentage of marriages end in divorce”. That is not a number you can read off an annual report. It requires following cohorts of couples married in a given year across decades, which SingStat does publish cohort analysis on, but it is inherently backward-looking: a complete answer for couples married in 2020 will not exist until roughly 2050. Any confident single percentage for “marriages that fail” is either a cohort figure being quoted without its cohort, or an invention.
Patterns the data is usually discussed in terms of
Rather than numbers, here is what the annual release breaks the data down by, so you know what to look for when you open it.
- Duration of marriage at divorce. Reported as a median and as a distribution across duration bands. The commentary usually notes whether marriages are ending earlier or later than in previous years, and whether longer-duration divorces are becoming a larger share.
- Age at divorce. Reported by age band for males and females. Shifts here often reflect shifts in the age at marriage rather than anything about divorce itself.
- Civil versus Muslim divorces. Reported both separately and together. The two populations differ in age structure and in average age at marriage, so combining them without noting the split obscures more than it reveals.
- Grounds and facts relied on. For civil divorces, the fact relied on to prove irretrievable breakdown. This is the part most affected by law changes: the addition of divorce by mutual agreement as a sixth fact from 1 July 2024 changes the distribution across facts without necessarily changing how many people divorce.
- Children involved. The number of divorces involving children under 21, and the number of children affected.
- Remarriages. Marriages where one or both parties were previously divorced, which is a growing category in most developed economies.
Reading a change in the numbers honestly
When a figure moves year on year, there are usually several candidate explanations before “people are giving up on marriage”.
Composition. An ageing married population, or a growing one, changes the denominator. A cohort that married in unusually large numbers twenty years ago will produce more divorces now simply by being larger.
Procedure and timing. Court processing, filing patterns and administrative changes move divorces between calendar years. A dip followed by a spike often means a backlog cleared, not a change in behaviour. The period around the pandemic is a clear example of timing effects on both marriages and divorces.
Law changes. Amendments to the Women’s Charter change how and when people can file. The mutual agreement fact, and the requirement for parents of young children to complete the co-parenting programme, both affect the shape of the data.
Which measure is being quoted. A headline saying divorces rose and one saying the divorce rate fell can both be true in the same year. Check which is which.
What the statistics cannot tell you about your own situation
This is the part that matters most to anyone reading this while thinking about their own marriage. Population statistics describe aggregates. They carry no predictive information about a specific couple, because the variation between individual marriages dwarfs anything visible in a national average.
Three specific traps:
- Median duration is not a countdown. Knowing the typical length of a marriage that ended in divorce says nothing about marriages that did not end. The statistic is calculated only on divorces.
- Rates are not probabilities for you. A rate per 1,000 married persons is a population frequency, not a personal risk score.
- “Everyone is divorcing” and “nobody is” are both wrong. Whichever direction the number moved, it moved by a small amount from a base most people misremember.
Where the data genuinely is useful to an individual is context. It tells you that divorce involving children is common enough that the courts have built structured processes around it, that longer marriages ending is not unusual, and that the legal system you are entering is a routine one handling a steady volume of cases, not an exceptional situation you have found yourself in alone.
How to look it up yourself
Go to singstat.gov.sg and search for Statistics on Marriages and Divorces. The report comes with a summary of key findings, downloadable data tables, and definitions of every measure used. Read the definitions section before the findings: it takes five minutes and it is the difference between reading the report and misreading it.
Note the reference year of whatever you are reading, because the release covers the previous year and secondary sources often quote figures several years old without saying so. And if you see a divorce statistic anywhere without a source and a year attached to it, treat it as decoration.
If the reason you are looking this up is that you are considering a divorce yourself, the numbers are not going to help with that decision. Our guides to preparing for a divorce and the divorce process in Singapore deal with the questions that actually apply to one household rather than five million people.
