Michigan’s No-Fault Divorce Law Is 54 Years Old

Michigan’s No-Fault Divorce Law Is 54 Years Old — Is It Still Working?

Michigan’s divorce rate has plummeted to historic lows since the no-fault adoption, but so has its marriage rate, raising questions about whether the 1972 law serves today’s families.

By Hermiz Law  |  March 13, 2026  |  Estimated reading time: 22 minutes

A Law Designed for a Different Michigan | Divorce Attorney Troy MI

On January 1, 1972, Michigan became one of the first states in the country to eliminate fault-based divorce entirely. Public Act 75 of 1971 wiped away the old requirements — adultery, cruelty, desertion, habitual drunkenness — and replaced them with a single, deceptively simple standard: that the marriage relationship had broken down and there was no reasonable likelihood it could be preserved.

Critics were furious. State Senator Fleming, the bill’s leading opponent, warned his colleagues that Michigan was about to “officially place the State of Michigan on record as favoring the easy breakup of marriages.” The divorce rate, he predicted, would “skyrocket.”

It didn’t.

The divorce rate climbed through the rest of the decade after the law took effect, peaking at 10.4 per 1,000 population in 1980. Then it began a long, steady descent that no one predicted. By 2023, Michigan’s divorce rate had fallen to 4.1 per 1,000 — lower than it has been at any point in the past century. Total filings dropped from 44,878 in 2004 to approximately 20,491 in 2023, a decline of roughly 54%.

But the decline masks a more complicated picture. Michigan’s marriage rate has also fallen by half since 1970, from 20.7 per 1,000 to 10.0 per 1,000 in 2023. Fewer people are getting married in the first place. The median age at divorce has climbed to 44 for men and 41 for women. And nationally, a political movement to roll back no-fault divorce laws has gained rhetorical momentum — even as it has achieved precisely zero legislative victories. No state has repealed its no-fault divorce law to date.

For families across metro Detroit — in Oakland, Wayne, and Macomb counties — this isn’t an abstract policy debate. Anyone who has searched for a divorce attorney in southeast Michigan is encountering a legal framework that was designed more than half a century ago, before the internet, before no-fault auto insurance, before the median home in Oakland County cost north of $300,000. The question worth asking, with 54 years of data to work with, is whether that framework is still doing what it was designed to do.

How Michigan Got Here | Divorce Lawyer Troy

Understanding what Michigan changed in 1972 requires understanding what came before it. Prior to Public Act 75, Michigan divorce law required the filing spouse to prove one of several specific fault grounds in open court. The recognized grounds included adultery, physical incompetence, imprisonment for three or more years, desertion for two consecutive years, and habitual drunkenness. A spouse who couldn’t prove fault — or whose partner hadn’t committed a recognized offense — had no legal path to ending the marriage.

The system was, by most accounts, a legal fiction. In 1970, the Michigan Law Revision Commission published a report that laid out four core failures of the fault regime with unusual candor. Divorce proceedings, the commission found, were “often based on fiction rather than fact.” Parties were routinely pressured into “unfair and unreasonable concessions” to obtain a divorce. The requirement that one spouse publicly recite the other’s cruel acts in court increased hostility rather than reducing it. And the proceedings “often ignored the basic issue” — whether the marriage was, in fact, beyond repair.

The commission’s findings reflected a national consensus that had been building since California became the first state to adopt no-fault divorce in 1970. The old system incentivized perjury, rewarded strategic cruelty claims, and did nothing to address the actual dynamics that caused marriages to fail. Divorce attorneys and judges knew it. The Michigan Bar Association’s Family Law Committee — which would ultimately oppose the reform — acknowledged the procedural problems even as it resisted the proposed solution.

The legislative fight was closer than the final margins suggest. Public Act 75 passed the Michigan House 72–22 and the Senate 23–12. The opposition centered on two arguments that would resurface a half-century later in other states: that removing fault would encourage divorce, and that it would strip the “innocent” spouse of bargaining power in property and support negotiations.

The bill’s supporters countered that the old system didn’t prevent divorce — it just made it uglier. Couples determined to end their marriages simply fabricated fault claims or negotiated sham agreements, exactly the kind of proceedings the Law Revision Commission had described as “often based on fiction rather than fact.” Michigan, the reformers argued, could do better.

Governor William Milliken signed the bill into law in 1971. It took effect on January 1, 1972. Michigan became one of the earliest adopters of a purely no-fault system — one of a handful of states where fault is not an available ground for divorce at all.

What the Law Actually Says — MCL 552.6 in Plain Language

More than fifty years later, the statute that replaced Michigan’s fault system remains remarkably short. Under MCL §552.6(1), the sole ground for divorce in Michigan is that “there has been a breakdown of the marriage relationship to the extent that the objects of matrimony have been destroyed and there remains no reasonable likelihood that the marriage can be preserved.”

In practice, this means the filing spouse does not need to explain why the marriage broke down. There is no requirement to prove infidelity, abuse, or any other specific act. At the pro confesso hearing — the brief court appearance where an uncontested divorce is finalized — the plaintiff simply testifies that the statutory standard has been met. The judge confirms. The marriage is dissolved.

Michigan is what family law practitioners call a “pure” no-fault state. Unlike some states that adopted no-fault as an additional ground while preserving traditional fault options, Michigan eliminated fault grounds entirely. You cannot file for divorce in Michigan on the basis of adultery, cruelty, or abandonment. The breakdown-of-relationship standard is the only path.

This leads to a common misconception that deserves correction: no-fault does not mean fault is irrelevant. While fault cannot be used to obtain a divorce, marital misconduct — including adultery, domestic violence, substance abuse, and financial dissipation — can still influence how the court divides property, awards spousal support, and determines custody arrangements. A divorce attorney navigating a case involving hidden assets or domestic violence in Oakland County is very much dealing with fault, even if the divorce petition itself makes no mention of it.

The Michigan State Bar’s Family Law Section has taken a formal position defending this distinction. The section has argued that the legislature “clearly rejected attempts to modify the support, alimony, and property division provision of existing law” when it passed the no-fault statute — meaning that fault was deliberately preserved as a factor in financial and custody outcomes, even as it was removed from the threshold question of whether a divorce could be granted at all.

The law also imposes mandatory waiting periods. Couples without minor children must wait a minimum of 60 days from the date of filing before a divorce can be finalized. Couples with minor children face a 180-day waiting period — six months — though a judge can reduce it to 60 days upon a showing of “unusual hardship.” In practice, an uncontested case with no children can be completed in 60 to 90 days. A contested divorce involving children, property disputes, or support disagreements can take six months to two years or longer.

The Case That It’s Working

The strongest evidence in favor of Michigan’s no-fault system doesn’t come from Michigan specifically — it comes from the national picture, measured across every state that made the same transition.

The Violence Data

In 2006, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published what remains the most influential empirical study of no-fault divorce’s social consequences. Their paper, “Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law,” appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and examined state-level data before and after no-fault adoption. The findings were striking. States that adopted no-fault divorce experienced an 8–16% decline in female suicide. Domestic violence fell by approximately 30%. The rate at which women were murdered by intimate partners declined by 10%.

The mechanism isn’t mysterious. Under a fault-based system, a spouse who wants to leave a dangerous marriage must first prove the danger — in court, on the record, to a judge’s satisfaction. That requirement creates a barrier that is highest precisely for the people who need exit most urgently: victims of domestic violence, who may face retaliation for filing, who may lack independent financial resources, and who may be unable to document abuse that occurs behind closed doors. No-fault lowers that barrier to its minimum. You don’t have to prove anything about your spouse. You just have to say the marriage is broken.

“What we saw was a decrease in female suicide. We saw a decrease in domestic abuse of wives. We saw a decrease in the homicide of women by intimate partners.”
— Joanna Grossman, Chair in Women and the Law, SMU Dedman School of Law — NPR, July 2024

When South Dakota considered restricting no-fault in 2024, the ACLU of South Dakota responded by commending the House committee that killed the bill, stating: “Everyone should have complete agency to leave a marriage for any reason, without government interference.”

The Divorce Rate Itself

Senator Fleming’s prediction that Michigan’s divorce rate would “skyrocket” wasn’t entirely wrong in the short term. Nationally, divorce rates did spike in the years immediately following no-fault adoption in many states. But that spike was temporary, and it was misleading.

Wolfers, in a separate 2006 paper published in the American Economic Review, demonstrated that the initial increases “substantially reversed” within a decade. The spike represented pent-up demand — couples who had wanted to divorce but couldn’t under the old system. Once that backlog cleared, rates settled. And they’ve been declining ever since. Wolfers concluded that legal changes “explain very little of the rise in the divorce rate.” The real drivers are socioeconomic and cultural: educational attainment, income stability, age at first marriage, and shifting gender norms.

Michigan’s own data bears this out. The divorce rate peaked at 10.4 per 1,000 in 1980, eight years after no-fault took effect. By 2023, it had fallen to 4.1 per 1,000 — less than half its peak. The 54% decline in filings since 2004 is real. The “sky-rocket” didn’t just fail to materialize — the trajectory reversed.

Shared Parenting

One criticism that frequently surfaces is that no-fault divorce undermines fathers’ rights or leads to one-sided custody outcomes. Michigan’s data tells a different story. Between 1990 and 2015, the share of Michigan cases in which courts granted joint custody rose from 13% to 44%. The no-fault framework — by removing the adversarial requirement to prove one spouse “at fault” — may actually have created conditions more favorable to cooperative custody arrangements.

Court Efficiency

There’s also a practical argument that rarely makes headlines but matters enormously to the people inside the system. An Oklahoma divorce attorney with 25 years of experience estimated that 99% of Oklahoma divorce cases are currently filed on no-fault or incompatibility grounds. Eliminating that option, she said, would leave courts “backed up for years.” The same dynamic applies in Michigan, where the vast majority of cases settle without trial — a pattern we’ll examine in detail when we look at Macomb County’s numbers below.

Public Opinion

The American public has increasingly endorsed the system. A record 73% of Americans now consider divorce morally acceptable, according to Gallup — up from 59% in 2001. For the first time, a majority of self-described “very religious” respondents agree. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults found that 55% believe unhappy couples tend to stay in bad marriages too long, versus 43% who say couples get divorced too quickly. The partisan divide is notable — 69% of Democrats hold the “stay too long” view, compared to 41% of Republicans — but even among Republicans, the appetite for actually restricting access to divorce is thin on the ground.

The Case That It’s Failing — or at Least Incomplete

The defense of no-fault is strong. It isn’t airtight. And the most serious criticisms don’t come from culture warriors or talk-show polemicists — they come from peer-reviewed research that deserves the same careful attention as the studies cited above.

The Financial Devastation of Gray Divorce

The most urgent problem may be the one that receives the least political attention. Researchers I-Fen Lin and Susan L. Brown, publishing in the Journals of Gerontology in 2020, found that women who divorce after age 50 experience a 45% decline in their standard of living. Men’s standard of living drops 21%. The asymmetry is stark, and it reflects decades of accumulated disadvantage: women in long marriages are more likely to have reduced their labor force participation, more likely to have smaller individual retirement accounts, and more likely to depend on a spouse’s Social Security benefits and pension.

No-fault divorce gives either spouse the unilateral right to exit. It does not, by itself, ensure that the economic consequences of that exit are equitable. A divorce attorney handling a gray divorce case in Oakland County — where the median home value exceeds $300,000 and retirement portfolios can run into the millions — confronts this asymmetry head-on. Michigan law gives judges discretion to consider the length of the marriage, each spouse’s earning capacity, and the contributions each made to marital assets. But discretion is not a guarantee, and the data suggests the outcomes are systematically worse for women.

The scale of gray divorce has grown enormously. Bowling Green State University researchers found that the divorce rate for adults over 50 has doubled since 1990. For those over 65, it has more than tripled. Gray divorces now account for approximately 36% of all U.S. divorces — up from a small fraction a generation ago. Michigan’s own data reflects this: the median divorce age of 44 for men and 41 for women, and the fact that 54% of Oakland County’s 2023 filings involved no minor children, both point to a system increasingly shaped by later-life dissolutions.

Reduced Investment in Marriage

Betsey Stevenson — the same economist whose work with Wolfers documented the violence reductions — published a separate study in the Journal of Labor Economics in 2007 that cut the other way. Stevenson found that newlyweds in states with no-fault divorce were 10% less likely to support a spouse through graduate school and 6% less likely to have a child together within the first two years of marriage.

The logic is straightforward and uncomfortable. Marriage-specific investments — supporting a spouse’s education, relocating for a partner’s career, choosing to have children — make sense when the partnership is durable. If either party can exit unilaterally and without penalty, those investments carry more risk. Stevenson’s finding doesn’t mean no-fault is wrong. It means the system has costs, and the people bearing those costs are disproportionately the spouses who make the bigger sacrifices.

1. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, has built on this line of argument. No-fault, Wilcox has written, made it “more difficult for ‘good’ marriages to take root and flourish” by reducing the incentive for marital investment. His position is contested — many family law scholars reject the premise that legal friction produces better marriages — but it draws on real data and deserves consideration alongside the evidence cited in the system’s defense.

Children’s Outcomes

The most politically explosive criticism centers on children. Economist Jonathan Gruber, in a widely cited NBER working paper later published in the Journal of Political Economy, studied adults who were children when their states adopted unilateral divorce. He found they were “less well educated and have lower family incomes” compared to cohorts that grew up before the legal change. They were also more likely to marry early and more likely to separate themselves.

Gruber’s findings have been debated extensively. Critics note that the cohorts he studied also experienced the broader economic disruptions of the 1970s and 1980s, and that separating the effects of legal change from those of macroeconomic forces is methodologically difficult. Supporters counter that the effects are robust across multiple specifications and that ignoring them is intellectually dishonest.

Former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears — who supports no-fault as a necessary safety valve for abusive marriages — has nonetheless warned that the system has been “destructive” to the institution of marriage. It’s a position that defies easy political categorization. Sears is a progressive jurist who ran on a platform of judicial independence. Her criticism comes from concern for family stability, not from any desire to trap people in bad marriages.

The Contract Argument

Beverly Willett, co-chair of the Coalition for Divorce Reform, frames the issue in contractual terms. No-fault divorce, she argues, “effectively ended marriage as a legal contract” because either party can terminate it unilaterally, without the other’s consent and without demonstrating breach. In virtually every other area of contract law, one party cannot walk away from a binding agreement without consequence. Marriage, under no-fault, is the exception.

The counterargument is that marriage is not a commercial contract — it is a human relationship with dimensions (emotional, sexual, parental) that contract law was never designed to govern. Forcing a person to remain in a marriage they want to leave, because their spouse hasn’t committed a legally recognized offense, is a remedy that serves the institution at the expense of the people inside it. The debate, at its core, is about which value takes priority: institutional durability or individual autonomy.

The Reform Landscape — What’s Happening Nationally and in Lansing

If you’ve followed national political media over the past two years, you might assume that no-fault divorce is under serious legislative threat. The reality is more nuanced — and the gap between rhetoric and legislative action is wide.

Recent State-Level No-Fault Divorce Bills

State	Year	Bill	Proposal	Status
Oklahoma	2024	SB 1958	Remove “incompatibility” as grounds	Died in committee
South Dakota	2024	HB 1254	Remove irreconcilable differences	Killed in committee
Texas	2025	HB 3401	Repeal no-fault entirely	Rejected in subcommittee
Texas	2017	HB 93	Repeal no-fault entirely	Died; 93% of attorneys opposed
Nebraska	2022	Platform	State GOP platform called for repeal	No bill introduced

Sources: LegiScan; ACLU of South Dakota; AP, Nov. 2024; Cramp Law Firm; Terry & Roberts Law

The pattern is consistent: bills get introduced, attract media attention, and die in committee. Not a single state has repealed its no-fault divorce law.

The Texas experience is particularly instructive. When HB 93 was introduced in 2017, the State Bar of Texas surveyed its family law practitioners. The results were overwhelming: 93% opposed repeal, and 94% predicted it would increase fees and prolong litigation for families. An academic paper from SMU’s Dedman School of Law concluded that “fault-based divorce neither lowers the divorce rate, nor alleviates the effects of divorce on children.” HB 93 died without a floor vote. When Texas tried again in 2025 with HB 3401, it was rejected in subcommittee.

Vice President JD Vance has been the most prominent national political figure to question no-fault divorce. In 2022, Vance stated that Americans “shift spouses like they change their underwear” and suggested that even marriages that were “maybe even violent” shouldn’t necessarily end in divorce. His comments generated significant media coverage and intensified public debate — but they have not translated into federal legislative proposals or executive action.

Mark A. Smith, a political science professor at the University of Washington, observed in an AP report that Americans are “accustomed to no-fault divorce being an option” — but warned that sustained political rhetoric could “jumpstart” restriction efforts. So far, it hasn’t.

Michigan’s Legislative Silence

Michigan’s story is defined by what hasn’t happened. An extensive search of the Michigan Legislature’s bill tracking system and the LegiScan database produced no results for any bill targeting MCL 552.6 for repeal, amendment, or modification in the past decade. Zero bills. Zero committee hearings. Zero floor votes.

The only Michigan divorce-related legislation in recent years has addressed peripheral issues. HB 5520, introduced in 2016, dealt with dower rights modernization. HB 4959, introduced in 2017, addressed prenuptial agreement standards. SB 160, filed in 2025, concerns the Uniform Premarital and Marital Agreements Act. None of these touched the core no-fault framework.

The Michigan State Bar’s Family Law Section has, if anything, reinforced the existing system. The section has argued that the legislature “clearly rejected attempts to modify the support, alimony, and property division provision of existing law” when it passed the no-fault statute. In other words: the bar’s position is that Michigan got the balance right in 1972, and no divorce lawyer or professional association in the state has publicly called for repeal of the core statute.

The Local Angle — What This Means for Oakland, Wayne, and Macomb Families

Statewide trends are useful for understanding the big picture. But divorce is a local experience — it happens in specific courthouses, before specific judges, with outcomes shaped by county-level caseloads and local legal culture. For metro Detroit, the data is both illuminating and, in some cases, surprising.

2023 New Divorce Filings by County

County	Circuit	With Children	Without Children	Total
Oakland	6th	1,608	1,917	3,525
Wayne	3rd	2,346	3,034	5,380
Macomb	16th	1,204	1,566	2,770

Source: Michigan Courts 2023 Caseload Reports (Oakland, Wayne, Macomb)

2023 Divorce Rates by County

County	Divorce Rate (per 1,000 pop. 15+)	% Filings Without Children
Oakland	3.7	54%
Wayne	2.5	56%
Macomb	3.3	57%

Source: Michigan DHHS, 2023; Michigan Courts 2023 Caseload Reports

Wayne County: Most Filings, Lowest Rate

Wayne County — home to Detroit and its immediate suburbs — filed the most divorces in the tri-county area in 2023 with 5,380 total cases. But Wayne also has the lowest divorce rate per capita at 2.5 per 1,000 population aged 15 and older, compared to Oakland’s 3.7 and Macomb’s 3.3. The likely explanation is straightforward: Wayne County’s marriage rate is also lower, reflecting broader socioeconomic patterns that suppress both marriage and divorce rates in urban areas with higher poverty and lower median income.

The composition of Wayne County’s filings is notable. Of 5,380 new divorce cases, 3,034 — approximately 56% — involved no minor children. The pattern mirrors the statewide shift toward later-life divorce, though Wayne’s numbers also reflect a younger population that is less likely to have married at all.

Oakland County: The Gray Divorce Capital of Metro Detroit

Oakland County’s 3,525 filings in 2023 represent a 21.7% decline from 4,500 in 2013 — a sharper drop than the statewide average. But the more telling number is the split: 1,917 filings without minor children versus 1,608 with. That means 54% of Oakland County divorces in 2023 involved no children in the household.

This is the gray divorce trend in granular, county-level data. Oakland County is the wealthiest of the three counties, with higher median incomes, higher home values, and more complex financial portfolios. A divorce lawyer handling an Oakland County case involving a long marriage, multiple retirement accounts, a business interest, and a primary residence worth $500,000 or more is dealing with a fundamentally different case than a Wayne County practitioner handling a shorter marriage with modest assets. The law is the same. The stakes are not.

Macomb County: The Settlement Engine

Macomb County’s 2,770 filings are the smallest of the three — but Macomb’s disposition data reveals something important about how the no-fault system actually functions in practice. Of 1,309 divorce-with-children dispositions in 2023, more than 1,000 were resolved through uncontested proceedings, default judgments, or negotiated settlements. That means roughly three out of four Macomb divorce cases involving children never went to trial.

This is the unglamorous truth about no-fault divorce that rarely makes the evening news: the overwhelming majority of cases settle. The system isn’t generating the courtroom warfare that critics imagine. It’s producing negotiated outcomes — imperfect ones, certainly, but outcomes reached through agreement rather than adversarial combat. Any divorce lawyer working in the 16th Circuit will confirm that a trial is the exception, not the rule.

What These Numbers Mean for Families Considering Divorce

The tri-county data underscores a practical reality for anyone weighing their options. The overwhelming majority of Michigan divorces — even those involving children — resolve without trial. The cases that do go to trial tend to involve high-asset disputes, contested custody arrangements, or allegations of dissipation or hidden assets. Whether a case settles in weeks or fights for years depends less on the law itself and more on the complexity of the family’s circumstances, the quality of legal representation, and the willingness of both parties to negotiate.

For families in metro Detroit, consulting a divorce attorney who understands the local court culture — who knows how judges in the 6th, 3rd, and 16th Circuits approach property division, custody, and spousal support — remains the most effective first step. The no-fault framework provides the structure. The outcomes depend on what happens within it.

So Is It Working?

The honest answer is: it depends on what you’re measuring.

If “working” means fewer divorces, lower rates of domestic violence, reduced female suicide, and a system that processes cases efficiently without forcing victims to prove their suffering in open court — then Michigan’s no-fault law is working. The data on these points is robust and largely uncontested.

If “working” means protecting economically vulnerable spouses from devastating financial consequences, ensuring that children thrive after family dissolution, and maintaining incentives for marital investment and commitment — then the record is much more mixed. Women’s 45% post-divorce standard-of-living decline is not a rounding error. The reduced likelihood of spousal educational support is not trivial. The children’s outcome data, while methodologically debated, is not easy to dismiss.

What’s clear is that the political movement to repeal no-fault divorce has no practical path in Michigan. No legislator has touched the law in a decade. The state bar defends it. The courts operate efficiently under it. And the public, by large majorities, supports the principle that unhappy marriages should be dissolvable.

The more productive questions — the ones that might actually improve outcomes for Michigan families — aren’t about whether no-fault should exist. They’re about what happens within the framework.   in long marriages. How retirement assets are divided when one spouse has deferred income for decades. How custody arrangements account for the evolving needs of adolescents versus toddlers. How mediation and collaborative divorce can reduce costs for families who can’t afford protracted litigation.

Michigan got something right in 1972. The question for 2026 isn’t whether to go back. It’s whether to go further — and whether the framework designed for the families of a half-century ago can be refined, without being abandoned, to serve the families that exist today.

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