Happy National Unmarried and Singles Week! The celebration originated in Ohio over 30 years ago when the Buckeye Singles Council of Columbus started National Singles Week. As the data show, the proportion of single Americans has grown each decade. 

When the week was first instituted in 1980, unmarried and single Americans made up 42.7 percent of the adult population (all single, separated, widowed and divorced Americans over the age of 15, as counted by the Census Bureau). By 2010, the unmarried and single population had become the majority, with 51.2 percent of Americans. Based on the newly released 2016 American Community Survey data, singletons now makeup 52.5 percent of the population totaling 137,633,547 people.

Washington, DC, has the highest singleton rate by far (71.8 percent), followed by Louisiana (57.5 percent) and Rhode Island (57.4 percent). Meanwhile, Utah has the lowest singleton rate of 45.1 percent.

Learn more about where single Americans live and how the population has shifted over the decades in the following SocialExplorer.com map. Explore the single, married, divorced, separated and widowed rates by county.

Use other Social Explorer tools to dig deeper–for example, high number of singles in certain counties might be linked to the presence of a university and a young population.

The rise of living alone is also much-discussed topic, and some notable singles have also earned recognition on this blog.