By 2030, roughly 45% of American women between the ages of 25 and 44 could be single, up from about 41% in 2018, according to a widely cited Morgan Stanley analysis known as the “Rise of the SHEconomy” report. The bank’s analysts projected that this group would grow about 1.2% per year, faster than overall U.S. population growth, driven by later marriage, more education, fewer children, and a higher cost of living.
That headline number is a projection, not a finished fact. It rests on 2019 data and assumptions about behavior holding steady. Still, the trend underneath it is real and already visible. The average age of first marriage in the United States has climbed to nearly 28 in 2023, compared with around 20 in 1960. Fertility rates have hit historic lows. None of this is random. It reflects choices women are making with their eyes open, and those choices are starting to ripple into housing, retail, healthcare, and the way researchers think about wellbeing.
What the Morgan Stanley projection actually says
The original Morgan Stanley note was a research piece for investors, not a sociology paper. Its authors looked at U.S. Census data, marriage and birth records, labor-force participation, and consumer spending, then asked what would happen if recent trends continued. The answer, in their model, was that by 2030 close to half of prime-working-age women would be unattached to a spouse. They labeled the resulting demographic the “SHEconomy” because it would, in their view, command a growing share of household income, real-estate purchases, and discretionary spending.
It’s worth being precise about what “single” means in this context. The bank’s analysts grouped together never-married women, divorced women, and widows in this age bracket. So a 27-year-old who’s putting marriage off until her thirties counts the same as a 42-year-old who chose not to marry at all, and the same as someone who married at 24 and divorced at 30. The lived experiences are different. The market signal, from a retailer’s point of view, is similar.
The 2019 data baseline matters too. A lot has happened since then. The pandemic changed family formation in ways researchers are still untangling. Inflation reshaped housing decisions. Remote work redrew where young people live. The 2030 number could land lower if marriage rebounds, or higher if the cost-of-living squeeze keeps pushing weddings down the priority list.
Why are women delaying marriage?
Several drivers show up consistently in the demographic literature. Women now outnumber men in U.S. college enrollment and in graduate programs, and education is the single strongest predictor of later marriage. Career investment compounds the effect. A woman who spends her late twenties building a salary base or a business has less reason, financially, to lock in a partnership early.
Money is the other half of the story. The cost of a starter home in many U.S. metros has roughly doubled relative to median income since the early 2000s. Childcare can run higher than rent. Student debt sits on millions of millennial and Gen Z balance sheets. When the math of forming a household is harder, the timeline stretches.
There’s a cultural piece too, harder to quantify but easy to see. Marriage is no longer the default ticket to financial security, social status, or even sex and companionship for women in their twenties. The cost of staying single dropped. The cost of marrying the wrong person, in a labor market where divorce is expensive and women now have more to lose financially, went up.
Generational attitudes layer on top of that. Polling consistently shows that younger women rate career, financial independence, and personal growth higher than previous cohorts did at the same age, and rate “having a successful marriage” lower as a top life priority. That doesn’t mean partnership has been written off. It means the timeline has been re-sequenced. Education, then a stable income, then maybe a house, then maybe a partner, then maybe a child. Each step is optional, each step has its own deadline, and a missed step doesn’t void the others.
It is not just one number
Demographers like to triangulate. The Morgan Stanley figure lines up with a stack of other observations. Median age at first birth has climbed past 27. The share of births to unmarried women has held above 40% for over a decade. Single-person households are the fastest-growing household type in the Census, surpassing married-with-children years ago. Across high-income countries, the same pattern shows up in slightly different shapes: marriage later, fewer children, more women living alone in their thirties and forties than at any time in modern record.
A 2026 multicentre survey protocol published in BMJ Open documents how seriously public-health researchers are taking the unmarried-women cohort, with a planned study across several Chinese megacities looking at sexual and reproductive health, fertility intentions, and access to care among unmarried women.2 The fact that this kind of study is being designed at all signals the demographic shift is now too large to treat as a side note in family research.
Are single women actually doing okay?
This is the question most readers care about, and the answer is more interesting than the usual headlines suggest. A 2026 study by Krämer and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology compared consistently single young adults in Germany and the United Kingdom with their partnered peers on life satisfaction, loneliness, and depressive symptoms.1 Singles, on average, reported somewhat lower life satisfaction and somewhat higher loneliness than partnered peers, but the gap was much smaller than older stereotypes would predict, and a meaningful subset of single adults rated their lives as good as the partnered comparison group.
The takeaway from that work isn’t that being single is a problem. It’s that singlehood, like partnership, is heterogeneous. Some single people are thriving. Some are struggling. The single biggest moderator across studies in this area is social connection, not relationship status itself. A woman with close friends, family contact, and an active community tends to score similarly to a married woman on most wellbeing measures. A woman who is socially isolated tends to do worse, whether or not there’s a husband in the house.
The flip side of the same coin is loneliness, and the health data on that is hard to ignore. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis in Aging Clinical and Experimental Research pooled dozens of cohort studies and found that loneliness, social isolation, and living alone each carry a measurable increase in mortality risk among older adults, with effect sizes broadly comparable to well-known risks like physical inactivity.3 A 2025 review in BMJ Oncology focused specifically on cancer outcomes and reported that lonely patients had higher cancer-specific mortality than less-lonely peers.4 A broader 2025 review in the European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education called loneliness a public-health challenge on par with smoking in some analyses.5
None of those studies say that single women are doomed. They say loneliness is dangerous, and loneliness can attach itself to any living arrangement. The practical implication for a 32-year-old who is single by choice is the opposite of what magazines used to print: don’t worry about the marriage timeline, do worry about whether you have three or four people you can call at 11 p.m.
What this reshapes outside the bedroom
Markets follow households. A growing population of unattached women in their prime earning years bends the shape of consumer demand in ways already visible. Apartments designed for one or two adults, with shared amenities instead of large private kitchens, are eating market share from suburban single-family stock in many cities. Subscription services, prepared meals, and small-batch grocery formats line up with smaller households. Solo travel, once a niche, is now a category that hotel chains chase. Financial services have started rebuilding products around women who own homes, hold equities, and plan retirement without a partner’s pension.
Healthcare is slower to adapt, and the gap is starting to show. Reproductive medicine, in particular, was built on assumptions about coupled patients. A 35-year-old single woman thinking about egg freezing or solo parenthood often runs into clinic intake forms designed for couples, insurance carve-outs that assume a male partner, and counseling protocols that don’t quite fit. Mental-health services face a parallel issue: depression screens that ask about marital satisfaction don’t tell you much about a woman whose social life runs through a friend group and a sister, not a spouse.
Preventive care is the quieter battleground. Single women are less likely to have someone nudging them about a flu shot, a mammogram, or a strange mole, and more likely to skip an appointment when work runs over. The fix isn’t a partner. It’s a system. A primary-care provider who actually calls back, an annual check-in calendar a friend group keeps together, a physical-therapy referral sent before chronic pain settles in. Built well, those patterns make the partnership question much smaller than it looks.
Retirement planning is the third underbuilt area. Conventional advice was designed around a household with two paychecks and a survivor benefit. A woman planning to fund forty years of life on her own salary needs a different savings rate, a different insurance mix, and a different attitude toward risk. The financial-services industry has started to notice. Plenty of advisors still haven’t.
Common questions about the SHEconomy projection
Is the 45% figure for 2030 a guarantee?
No. It’s a Morgan Stanley projection from 2019 data, not a measured outcome. It assumes recent trends in marriage, education, and fertility hold roughly steady. Real numbers in 2030 could come in higher or lower depending on the economy, policy, and culture.
Does single mean lonely?
Not automatically. Recent research finds that single adults vary widely in life satisfaction and loneliness, and a sizable subset rate their wellbeing similarly to partnered peers.1 Social connection matters more than marital status.
Is there a real health risk to living alone?
The risk is from chronic loneliness and social isolation, which carry measurable increases in mortality and disease risk in older adults.3,5 Living alone is a risk factor mainly when it overlaps with weak social ties.
Why are fertility rates dropping?
Education, careers, the cost of housing and childcare, later marriage, and shifting preferences all contribute. None of these factors acts alone, and the mix is different in different countries.
What about women who want marriage but haven’t found it?
The aggregate trend doesn’t speak to individual preferences. Many of the women in the projected single share would prefer to be partnered. The cohort blends choice and circumstance, and policy debates that miss that distinction tend to land badly.
What the data is quietly telling women in their thirties
The honest read of the evidence isn’t that singlehood is bad and marriage is good, or that singlehood is liberation and marriage is a trap. The honest read is more pragmatic. Whatever the household form, the predictors of a long, healthy life keep coming back to the same short list: a few close ties, a sense of purpose, sleep, movement, money you control, and a willingness to call the doctor when something feels off. A married woman without those things does worse than a single woman with them. The Morgan Stanley projection is interesting because it forces a culture built around the couple to take the single woman seriously as a default reader, patient, customer, and citizen, not as an exception waiting to convert.
The number for 2030 may land at 45%, or 42%, or somewhere else. Either way, the deeper shift is here. The next decade of beauty, health, and consumer industries will be designed, increasingly, for women whose lives don’t pivot around a wedding day, and the smartest companies and clinicians are already adjusting. So are the women themselves, often more quietly and more competently than the headlines give them credit for.
Sources
- Krämer MD et al. Life satisfaction, loneliness, and depressivity in consistently single young adults in Germany and the United Kingdom. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2026. PubMed: 41525385
- Yang F et al. Protocol for a multicentre survey of sexual and reproductive health and fertility among unmarried women living in China’s megacities. BMJ Open. 2026. PubMed: 42014149
- Nakou A et al. Loneliness, social isolation, and living alone: a comprehensive systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-regression of mortality risks in older adults. Aging Clin Exp Res. 2025. PubMed: 39836319
- Cheng S et al. Impact of loneliness on cancer mortality: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Oncol. 2025. PubMed: 41158749
- Zeas-Sigüenza A et al. Loneliness as a Public Health Challenge: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis to Inform Policy and Practice. Eur J Investig Health Psychol Educ. 2025. PubMed: 40709964
