Forest Hills is Michigan’s most married place: 75.2% of adults are married, vs 19.3% in East Lansing

Picture two Saturday mornings in Michigan. On a quiet street in Forest Hills, a couple loads a minivan for soccer while a neighbor waves from the driveway. Across the state in East Lansing, a pair of roommates walks to a coffee shop before a study group. Both scenes are ordinary Michigan life. The numbers below describe how common each kind of household is, place by place, without ranking one as better.

Forest Hills leads, and only 31 of 101 places beat the state

To find the most married cities in Michigan, we compared all 101 places with at least 10,000 residents. The share of adults (age 15 and older) who are currently married runs from 75.2% in Forest Hills down to 19.3% in East Lansing. That is a gap of 55.9 percentage points.

Michigan as a whole sits at 47.6%. Just 31 of the 101 places are above it, and 28 reach 50% or more. In other words, most of the state’s larger communities have fewer married adults than Michigan overall, which suggests that many married households live in the townships, small towns and rural areas that fall below the 10,000-resident line. Our county-level marriage data shows that pattern clearly.

Where married adults cluster: Kent County suburbs, Oakland County and the Grosse Pointes

The top of the list is dominated by established suburbs. Forest Hills and East Grand Rapids (70.6%) sit on the east side of Grand Rapids, and Jenison (65.6%) is just across the line in Ottawa County. Northview (56.1%) and Grandville (53.4%) extend the Kent County pattern.

Oakland County holds 9 of the top 25 spots: Beverly Hills (64.0%), Troy (57.8%), Novi (57.4%), Birmingham (57.2%), Rochester Hills (56.9%), South Lyon, Farmington, Farmington Hills and Berkley. If you live in the county, the Oakland County overview puts those suburbs side by side. In Wayne County, Grosse Pointe Park (61.6%) and Grosse Pointe Woods (56.6%) also rank high, as do Livonia (52.8%) and the Downriver communities of Flat Rock and Trenton.

One place stands apart. Hamtramck ranks 15th at 53.1% married even though its median age is 26.5 and its median household income is $39,293, among the lowest of the 101 places. Nearly half of Hamtramck residents (46.7%) were born outside the United States, and the city’s high marriage share is a reminder that faith, culture and immigration shape family life at least as much as income does.

Why the least married places look the way they do

The bottom of the ranking falls into two groups. The first is college towns. East Lansing (19.3%), Mount Pleasant (20.1%), Ypsilanti (23.5%) and Allendale (24.6%) are home to Michigan State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan and Grand Valley State. Their median ages run from 21.3 to 27.7, and most adults there are students or recent graduates who have simply not reached the ages when most people marry.

The second group is older industrial cities: Flint (22.2%), Detroit (22.3%), Inkster (22.4%), Pontiac (25.3%) and Saginaw (26.8%). Here the never-married share is high (57.0% in Detroit) and median ages are in the mid-30s, so youth alone does not explain it. Differences in income, housing and household patterns likely play a part, and a married share cannot show the many adults who live with partners and raise children without being married.

Top and bottom 10 Michigan places by share of adults married

The chart above shows the top 25. The full ranking of all 101 places is in the data table beneath it.

How we measured “married” for each place

All figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) 2024 5-year estimates, which pool responses collected from January 2020 through December 2024. We pulled table B12001 (Sex by Marital Status) through the Census Reporter API for every Michigan place with a population of 10,000 or more: 90 cities, 10 census-designated places (such as Forest Hills, Jenison and Okemos) and one village (Beverly Hills).

The ACS asks everyone 15 and older whether they are now married, widowed, divorced, separated or never married. Our “married” share counts people who are now married, except separated, divided by all residents 15 and older. Separated people are left out of this measure. Median age comes from table B01002. The count of places above the statewide figure is a simple tally of the 101 rows against 47.6%.

What these numbers cannot tell you

• They are a snapshot, not a trend. A married share describes who is married right now, not how many weddings happen each year. For yearly flows, CDC’s National Vital Statistics System reports a provisional Michigan marriage rate of 5.1 per 1,000 residents in 2024, compared with 6.3 nationally.
• Survey estimates carry error. Smaller places like Beverly Hills or East Grand Rapids have wider margins of error, so places a point or two apart may not truly differ.
• Cohabiting couples are invisible here. Partners who live together without marrying are counted as never married, divorced or widowed.
• Nothing here measures happiness. A high married share says nothing about how well those marriages are going, and a low one says nothing about how connected people feel.

What this means for couples and families in Michigan

If you live in one of the most married suburbs, it can feel as if everyone around you has it figured out. If you live in a college town or a city where marriage is less common, you may feel the opposite pressure. Neither feeling is a verdict on your relationship. These percentages describe neighborhoods, not people.

What does seem true is that every stage has its own work. Couples planning a wedding often benefit from talking through money, family and expectations early, which is the heart of premarital counseling. Long-married partners in busy suburbs sometimes find they have become efficient co-managers rather than close companions, and marriage counseling can be a place to reconnect. For a closer look at how money lines up with these patterns, see our analysis of marriage and household income in Michigan.

Iryna Morhunova-Sutton, LLMFT, meets with individuals, couples and families online, anywhere in Michigan. Her goal, in her words, is to “meet you where you are, honor your story,” whatever your household looks like.

When this ranking will be updated

We refresh this page each December, when the Census Bureau releases a new ACS 5-year dataset. The next release will cover 2021 to 2025. If a figure here looks wrong for your community, the full table lets you check every place, and we correct errors as soon as we confirm them.