Rabat – After three decades without an official national snapshot of family life, Morocco now has fresh data on how households are structured and evolving, thanks to the Haut-Commissariat au Plan (HCP)’s 2025 National Family Survey, the first of its kind since 1995.
Built on interviews with 14,020 households conducted between May and September 2025, the survey’s headline findings lands with the weight of an actual statistic rather than a cultural impression: half of Moroccans say they no longer want to marry.
It would be easy to read that number as a story about romance fading out but the data reveals something more specific and more interesting.
Permanent singlehood, meaning never having married by age 55, has doubled in a decade, climbing from 5.9% in 2014 to 9.4% in 2024.
This shift hits women harder than men. 11.1% of women remain unmarried by that age, compared to 7.6% of men. Urban residents are also more likely to stay single than residents of rural regions.
At 35, an age once considered firmly settled into adult family life, 16.5% of Moroccans have neither left their parents’ home nor married. This figure splits to 20.3% of men and 12.9% of women.
What makes this picture counterintuitive is the gender gap moving in opposite directions.
Between 2004 and 2024, the average age at first marriage for women actually fell from 26.3 to 24.6. Men’s average age rose over the same period, from 31.2 to 32.4.
This is not a story of a generation uniformly delaying marriage. It is two populations diverging: women marrying somewhat younger on average while a growing share do not marry all together, and men marrying considerably later, often well into their thirties.
Economics are linked to nearly every layer of the data. Researchers in the HCP have linked the rise in adult men still living with their parents after marriage, which now stands at 27.8% of married men at the age of 35, to constraints in the housing market rather than personal preference.
Household size nationally has shrunk from 4.6 people in 2014 to 3.9 in 2024 and because small households still need their own roof, the total number of households is growing nearly three times faster than the population itself.
However, Morocco’s housing market has not caught up yet because developers continue building units sized for the large, multigenerational families of a generation ago, while actual demand has shifted toward smaller units suited for single, divorced, and elderly people living alone.
Nuclear households, meaning a couple and their unmarried children, now make up 73% of Moroccan households, up from under 61% in 1995. Extended family living arrangements have fallen sharply, from 35.2% of households in 1995 to 19.8% today.
Childless couples, who were once a marginal category, have nearly tripled from 3.4% in 1995 to 9.4% in 2025. This is a trend that the HCP attributes largely to an aging population and the rise of empty-nest households rather than younger couples choosing not to have children.
Divorce has also climbed, although more modestly than the marriage figures suggest. The ENF 2025 puts the annual divorce rate at 3.6 per thousand nationally with a clear urban-rural split (4.3 per thousand in cities versus 2.5 in the countryside) and a sharper gender gap of 4.9 per thousand among women compared to 2.4 among men.
The leading causes cited for divorce are domestic disagreements (30.9%), economic hardship (12%), in-law conflict (11.6%) and domestic violence (8.8%)
None of these statistics suggest that marriage has lost its cultural weight. The HCP’s own framing insists family is still a central pillar of Moroccan social life. It is still the primary structure for solidarity and the transmission of values across generations.
The HCP has signaled that anonymized survey data will be made available to researchers starting July 2026, alongside three related surveys on living standards, labor, and time use, suggesting this first read is only the opening chapter of a bigger demographic story.
