Information only. This site gives general information and is not legal advice. Please seek legal advice from a qualified solicitor about your own situation.
Skip to content

The Divorce Day Report

What the court figures say about divorce in England and Wales, and whether January really is different.

2027 edition. Built from Family Court Statistics Quarterly: April to June 2026, published by the Ministry of Justice on 24 September 2026. The next release is due on 17 December 2026, and we will update this page after it.

Key findings

  • 26,834 divorce applications were made in England and Wales in April to June 2026. That is 3% fewer than in the same quarter of 2025.
  • 25,550 final orders were granted in April to June 2026, down 9% on the same quarter of 2025.
  • 73% of applications were sole applications and 27% were joint applications, made by both people together.
  • The median time from application to final order was 40 weeks. The median time to a conditional order was 28 weeks.
  • 110,638 divorce applications were made in 2025 as a whole (our total of the four quarters).
  • Applications stay fairly steady through the year. January to March was the busiest quarter in each of 2023, 2024 and 2025, with 27% to 28% of the year’s applications. October to December was the quietest, with 22% to 23%.

Divorce applications and final orders by quarter

Table 1. Divorce applications made and final orders granted in England and Wales, by quarter. Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics Quarterly: April to June 2026 (divorce CSV file).
QuarterDivorce applicationsFinal orders
July to September 202428,11027,272
October to December 202425,17223,414
January to March 202530,27422,090
April to June 202527,78828,162
July to September 202527,94927,730
October to December 202524,62727,750
January to March 202629,19427,323
April to June 202626,83425,550

A divorce takes many months, so the final orders in any quarter mostly come from applications made the year before. They do not tell you what people decided in that quarter.

Is there a January rush?

Table 2. Share of each year’s divorce applications made in each quarter. If applications were spread evenly, each quarter would have 25%. Our calculation from the same Ministry of Justice file.
YearJanuary to MarchApril to JuneJuly to SeptemberOctober to DecemberTotal
202327.8%25.0%25.4%21.8%113,142
202427.0%24.9%25.4%22.8%110,610
202527.4%25.1%25.3%22.3%110,638

Each year from 2023 to 2025, January to March had between 8% and 11% more applications than an average quarter. That is a small, steady rise, not a spike. The other quarters were close to an even share, with fewer applications in October to December, around Christmas.

So the court figures do not show a rush to file for divorce in January. What family lawyers report on Divorce Day is a rise in enquiries: people asking questions and looking for information. The Law Society Gazette has made the same point, noting that enquiries do not always lead to a divorce being started soon afterwards, if at all.

These figures are quarterly, so they cannot show what happens on a single day or week.

How we made this report

  • What is counted. Divorce applications are new applications to end a marriage made to the family court in each quarter, sole and joint, under the no fault divorce law in force since April 2022. Final orders are final orders (and, for older cases, decrees absolute) granted in each quarter. We have left out civil partnership dissolutions, annulments and judicial separations.
  • Where. England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their own figures.
  • Provisional figures. The Ministry of Justice takes these figures from live court records, and it revises earlier figures in later releases. Treat the most recent quarters as provisional. They may change.
  • Applications are not enquiries. These figures count cases started at court. They do not count calls to solicitors, web searches or people thinking about separating, which is what rises after Christmas.
  • Our working. We added up the quarterly figures in the Ministry of Justice divorce data file published with the release. Our totals for April to June 2026 (26,834 applications and 25,550 final orders) match the figures in the bulletin text. The yearly totals and percentages are our own calculations.

Journalists are welcome to use these figures. Please credit the Ministry of Justice as the source of the data and The Divorce Day Report for the analysis. See the press page for more.

Sources