China's Marriages Rise for the First Time in Thirteen Years

The Ministry of Civil Affairs published its annual statistical bulletin on September 30 with an unexpected headline buried in the tables: 6.765 million couples registered marriages across China in 2025, an increase of 10.8 percent over 2024 — the first annual rise since 2013. In raw terms the country gained roughly 657,000 weddings against the year before, when registrations sank to around 6.1 million. The marriage rate itself ticked up as well, to 4.8 per thousand people.

The bulletin's demographic detail is as telling as the total. The 25-to-29 age band again supplied the largest share of newlyweds — just under five million people, or 36.9 percent — making it, for the thirteenth consecutive year, the age group that marries most. The cohort getting married has not changed; what changed is how much of it chose to marry.

Why the number matters beyond the registry: marriage registrations are the leading indicator China's policymakers track for births, and years of unbroken decline have pushed local governments to get creative. Counties and even some retailers have started paying couples to marry, and with gold prices sliding, twenty-somethings have been stocking up on bridal gold as savings they can wear. The new bulletin records the turn without explaining it, and the topic drew attention well beyond Weibo within hours, charting on Baidu's news board and in Hong Kong media the same morning.

The reaction online was less triumphal than reflective. One widely shared post stared at the figure for a while and decided it read less like a recovery than like a decision: 6.765 million couples meant 6.765 million choices to split a life down the middle. "It's not that people don't want to marry — they're being more careful. Being careful is good; being late is fine, as long as it's real" (不是不想，是更慎重了). The post's commenters traded their own registration-day memories; more than one recalled the clerk at the counter simply saying congratulations, and not managing to hold it together afterward.

The bulletin counts 4,162 marriage registration venues nationwide, 1,134 of them standalone offices. The detail that travelled furthest on Chinese social media, though, was not in the tables but in the broadcast coverage that ran with the figures: file footage pointed out that tourist couples can now marry on the spot at scenic sites, and that some registration desks have opened at highway service areas — the state meeting couples wherever they happen to be. One year does not make a trend; the last increase, in 2013, was followed by eleven straight years of decline. But the mechanism worth watching is already visible: a rise delivered not by grand policy, but by making the paperwork turn up where the weddings do.