The number of divorces and one-person households grow, and the majority of families consist of a couple with one child

Release of the 2021 Census data

According to the 2021 Census data, a share of never married men and women as well as a share of the divorced is higher in relation to these shares in the previous censuses. Thus, the share of never married men in 2021 was 35.3% and the share of the divorced was 5.8%. As expected, the higher the share of unmarried persons, the lower the number of married persons, so in 2021 there were 55.2% of them.
 
 
The same trend is true for women, i.e. the number of unmarried and divorced women increases, while the number of married women decreases.
 
 
Observing the data according to the type of union a person lives in, and according to how a person actually lives within the household irrespective of his or her marital status, out of the total population aged 15 years and over, 49.30% of persons live in a marriage, 4.05% in a cohabitant union, 0.01% in a life partnership with a person of the same sex and 0.03% in an informal partnership with a person of the same sex, while as much as 46.61% of inhabitants do not live in any of the mentioned types of union.
 
 
Regarding the data on families, in the Republic of Croatia in 2021, there was a total of 1.1 million families, of which 69.5% were families with children and 30.5% were families without children.
 
 
The data from the previous censuses show a continuous decrease in the share of the ''couple with children'' type of family in the total number of families. For example, the share of this type of family was 63.8% in 1971, while in 2021 it dropped to 49.7%. At the same time, the types of family including ''couple without children'' and ''lone mother/father with children'' increase.

Out of the total number of families with children, 52.5% account for families with one child, 35.1% account for families with two children, 9.8% account for families with three children, 1.9% account for families with four children and 0.7% account for families with five and more children. The largest share of families of five and more children was recorded in the County of Međimurje (2.0%) and the County of Bjelovar-Bilogora (1.3%), while the largest share of families with one child was recorded in the County of Primorje-Gorski kotar (60.4%) and the County of Istria (57.3%).
 
The most private households are family households, that is, households occupied by at least one family, but their number also decreases over years. For example, the share of family households was 82.2% in 1981, while in 2021 it dropped to 70.4%. At the same time, the share of one-person households increased from 16.0% to 27.8%.
 
 
Detailed data on population by legal marital status, type of union a person lives in, number of live born children (for women aged 15 years and over) and data on households and families are available on the link below - Census of Population 2021.  

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