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A total of 16,319 married couples divorced in Austria in 2019, 3,947 of them in Vienna. According to lawyers, this year will continue the great divorce boom.
Statistics Austria published the 2019 divorce figures on Wednesday. 16,319 married couples in Austria were legally divorced. That’s just a slight increase (+ 0.1 percent) compared to the previous year. At the same time, 121 registered companies were dissolved, 23 more than in 2018 (+23.5 percent).
The highest divorce rate in Lower Austria
“About four out of ten marriages in Austria end up before the divorce judge sooner or later. In 2019, the total divorce rate of 40.7 percent was slightly below the level of the previous two years (41.0 percent ), but well below the previous high of 49.5 percent in 2007, “explains Statistics Austria CEO Tobias Thomas.
Across Austria, the overall divorce rate in 2019 was 40.7 percent. Almost 4,000 of 16,319 are in Vienna. After Lower Austria (44.4 percent), Vienna had the second highest divorce rate (44.1 percent). Vorarlberg and Burgenland (each 42.9 percent) and Carinthia (41.2 percent) came in second. In Salzburg (38.3 percent), Upper Austria (37.8 percent), and Styria (37.3 percent), the overall divorce rate was lower than average. In Tyrol, the overall divorce rate was the lowest at 34.9%, as it had been since 2017.
86.3 percent of all divorces in the previous year were by mutual consent. The mean (median) duration of divorced marriages in 2019 was 10.5 years, slightly below the 2018 level (10.6 years).
“Summer is a strong time for divorce”
Statistics Austria did not yet have data for the previous year 2020. No divorces took place during the lockdown period due to limited court operations. As “Radio Wien” reports, divorce claims were filed in Favoriten district court by 18 percent less in the first half of the year.
Lawyer Clemens Gärner from the Viennese family law firm Gärner Perl is still expecting a divorce boom due to the crown crisis. “Summer is a very strong time for divorces. But this summer we saw an increase in the divorce rate of another 30 percent,” Gärner emphasized. However, this also includes divorces initiated by people who planned to do so before the crown crisis.
