China's marriages fall to lowest on record despite cash payments and matchmaking drives

The number of marriages registered in China fell to 4.3 million in the first nine months of 2026, the lowest figure for the period since records began in 1986 and less than half the total for the same months in 2016, according to data released by the civil affairs ministry on Friday.

The figures suggest that the full-year total will fall below 5.5 million for the first time, continuing a decline that paused only briefly in 2023. They come despite a widening range of inducements from provincial and city governments, including cash payments of up to 10,000 yuan (£1,100) to couples who marry before 30, extended paid leave for newlyweds, state-run dating events and, in several provinces, the abolition of the requirement to register marriages in the bride's or groom's home town.

The fall is partly demographic: the cohort now in its late 20s was born during the strictest years of the one-child policy and is about a third smaller than the one born a decade earlier, with 30 million more men than women. But surveys point to a change in attitudes that incentives have not reached. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences last year found that 44% of urban women under 30 said they did not intend to marry, up from 15% in 2016.

“My parents' generation married because there was no other way to live. I have a flat, a job and a dog,” said Li Wenjing, 29, who works in marketing in Shanghai. “Every holiday I go home and the whole village asks when. The government is offering me 8,000 yuan. My rent is 7,000 a month. It is not a serious offer.”

The cost of marriage itself is one deterrent. The customary bride price paid by a groom's family, which the government has campaigned against since 2023, still averages more than 100,000 yuan in rural parts of Jiangxi and Henan, and property in large cities remains out of reach for most young couples despite a 25% fall in prices since 2021. Youth unemployment, at around 17% on the official measure, is another.

Prof Zhang Hui, a demographer at Renmin University, said the state had been slow to understand that marriage and childbirth were being refused rather than postponed. “The policy toolkit is built for people who want to marry and cannot afford it. It has nothing for people who can afford it and do not want to,” she said. “Giving a woman 10,000 yuan to marry when marriage will cost her career is not an incentive. It is an insult, and the surveys show young women read it as one.”

Births fell to 8.7 million in 2025, the lowest since the founding of the People's Republic, and the population has shrunk for four consecutive years. The government has set a target of raising the fertility rate from 1.0 to 1.3 by 2035; no large country has ever achieved such a reversal.

The civil affairs ministry said it would publish a national marriage and family support plan before the end of the year.