Divorce after age 60: Changing patterns across cohorts in Sweden

Many Western countries have experienced an increase in divorce among older adults, even as divorce rates among younger individuals have stabilized or decreased. We examine divorce trends in Sweden, a country that has seen rapid changes in family life and union stability over the 20th and 21st centuries. This study examined divorce trends among individuals aged 60 years and older in cohorts born from 1940–1960 in the years 2000 to 2022, focusing on how marital duration, remarriage status, and educational attainment affect divorce risk across cohorts. We used Swedish register data to analyse late-life divorce risk in cohorts born from 1940–1960. We used Kaplan–Meier survival analysis to show divorce trends by sex and age groups, and event history models to assess how marital duration, remarriage status, and educational attainment affected divorce risks across cohorts. Our findings showed a modest increase in divorce after age 60 across cohorts. Individuals who remarried and those with shorter marital durations faced greater divorce risk. Across cohorts, we identified a shifting trend by education level; earlier cohorts presented higher divorce risks among women with higher education levels, whereas more recent cohorts presented increased risk among those with lower education levels. We concluded that the increase in late-life divorce in Sweden increased over time, and was partly driven by a higher share of shorter marriages and higher risks among remarried individuals, with educational differences also playing a role. This study provides novel and important insights into how family dissolution dynamics in later life have evolved across cohorts in a Western context.