The Husband Is the Main Breadwinner in About 55% of Marriages, Down From 85% in 1972
The single-earner marriage is no longer the default
The husband is the main breadwinner in about 55% of marriages, down from 85% in 1972, per PEW. Pew Research Center's analysis of US Census Bureau data found that while men remain the main breadwinner in a majority of opposite-sex marriages, the share of women who earn as much as or significantly more than their husbands has roughly tripled over the past 50 years.
The husband is the main breadwinner in about 55% of marriages, down from 85% in 1972, per Pew Research Center.
What replaced it: equal earners and breadwinner wives
In 29% of marriages today, both spouses earn about the same amount of money, and in 16% the wife is the primary or sole breadwinner, up from just 5% in 1972, per Pew. The shift is driven mainly by the collapse of the sole-earner model: husbands were the only earner in 49% of marriages in 1972, compared with 23% today.
The earnings convergence has not produced the same convergence at home. Pew found that wives still spend more time on caregiving and housework than their husbands in nearly every arrangement, including egalitarian marriages, where wives average 6.9 hours a week on caregiving and 4.6 on housework against roughly 5 and 2 hours for husbands. The only exception is marriages where the wife is the sole breadwinner, where husbands devote more time to caregiving. The pattern also varies by race: about 26% of married Black women earn more than their husbands, compared with 17% of White wives, 14% of Asian wives and 13% of Hispanic wives, per Pew's figures.
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Options market and stocks to watch
Two-income households are a structural support for consumer spending, and their rise helps explain why discretionary demand has held up through rate cycles that were supposed to break it: XLY is the cleanest read on that resilience, while XHB captures the dual-income mortgage qualification that now underpins most home purchases.
Watch the labor data for married women's participation and earnings growth, and follow household economics on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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