More than a quarter of American households are made up of people living alone as the ranks of senior citizens swell and younger Americans continue to delay life milestones that previous generations reached earlier in life.
There were 37 million one-person households in the United States in 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported this week, representing 28 percent of all households across the country and 15 percent of the overall population.
In 1960, just 13 percent of households were occupied by just one person. In the past decade, the number of Americans living alone jumped by 4 million.
Just half of American adults, 50 percent, are living with a spouse, down from 52 percent a decade ago. At the same time, the share of Americans living with an unmarried partner is rising — today, 8 percent of Americans over the age of 18 live with a partner to whom they are not wedded, almost double the 4.1 percent rate the Census Bureau measured in 2001.