Cohabitation in the United States

Cohabitation in the United States is loosely defined as two or more people, in an intimate relationship, who live together and share a common domestic life but are neither joined by marriage nor a civil union. Cohabitation of unmarried couples totals about 8.1 million couples who live together in the United States as of 2011.

In most parts of the United States, there is no legal registration or definition of cohabitation, so demographers have developed various methods of identifying cohabitation and measuring its prevalence. The Census Bureau, currently describes an "unmarried partner" as a "person age 15 years and over, who is not related to the householder, who shares living quarters, and who has a close personal relationship with the householder." Before 1995, the Bureau identified any "unrelated" opposite-sex couple living with no other adults as "POSSLQs", or Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters. and the Bureau still report these numbers to show historical trends. However, such measures should be taken loosely, as researchers report that cohabitation often does not have clear start and end dates, as people move in and out of each other's homes and sometimes do not agree on the definition of their living arrangement at a particular moment.

In 2001, in the United States 8.2% of couples were calculated to be cohabiting, the majority of them in the West Coast and New England/Northeastern United States areas.

In 2005, the Census Bureau reported 4.85 million cohabiting couples, up more than ten times from 1960, when there were 439,000 such couples. The 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than half of all women aged 15 to 44 have lived with an unmarried partner, and that 65% of American couples who did cohabit got married within 5 years.

In 2011, the Census Bureau reported 7.6 million opposite-sex cohabiting couples in the country with a separate report listing the number of cohabiting same-sex couples at 514,735 as of the 2010 Census.

The cohabiting population includes all age groups, but the average cohabiting age group is between 25-34.

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