Married People Are Much Happier
Exploring the correlation between wedding vows and well-being.
- By
- June 24, 2025
- CBR - Economics
For about half a century, a survey has been asking adults in the United States about their happiness—and a study of the data shows that married people are consistently happier than unmarried people. Marriage, writes the study’s author, Chicago Booth’s Sam Peltzman, is the single biggest predictor of happiness—even more important than money.
In follow-up research, Peltzman searched for exceptions in what he calls the “marital premium,” the difference in the average happiness between married people and unmarried people, which he calculates as 30 percentage points, on average.
What about people who aren’t married but have been living with a romantic partner for a long time? Or the differences between people who do or don’t have kids, or who have sex more or less frequently? Marriage can’t be equally important to all of these groups, can it? In fact, Peltzman finds that the marital premium across the board hovers right around that 30 percentage points.
Happy together
One outlier he observed was that married lesbians had a marital premium of about 23 points, significantly below the average. By contrast, the marital premium for gay men was about 31 points. However, Peltzman notes that the data aren’t as robust for these groups as they are for heterosexual couples. Gay marriage has only been legal nationwide since 2015, and the sample size for gay couples in the survey is relatively small.
But other than that outlier, the marital premium was surprisingly consistent regardless of race, gender, income, age, or education level.
Peltzman says that his biggest surprise had to do with cohabitation. Unmarried people who lived with someone else—whether with romantic partners, roommates, or family—were happier than other unmarried people. This “cohabitation premium” is about 10 percentage points, so still just a fraction of the marital premium.
No one should use these findings to make specific, granular decisions about their own lives, Peltzman warns, saying he’s merely presenting an observation based on data averages. There are many unhappy people who are married, and there are also many happy people who are unmarried. Finally, he points out that correlation is not causation. “Is it the marriage causing the happiness, or are happy people getting married?” he asks. “It’s probably both.”
- Sam Peltzman, “The Anatomy of Marital Happiness,” Working paper, March 2025.
- ———, “The Socio Political Demography of Happiness,” Working paper, October 2023.
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