Study: Beyond Lifelong Marriage and Spousal Coresidence: A Research Note on Racial and Ethnic Differences in Late-Life Family and Living Arrangements (10.1215/00703370-12458349)
White Americans over 50 spend more years married and living with a spouse compared to Black and Hispanic adults, highlighting sharp racial divides in later-life living arrangements.
While white seniors mostly follow the traditional path of stable marriage, Black older adults are more likely to spend prolonged periods unmarried and living alone or with extended family. Hispanic seniors often find themselves somewhere in between, according to a new University of Michigan study.
These findings, published in the journal Demography, revealed critical questions about whether policies based on long-term spousal cohabitation truly serve a diversifying, rapidly changing nation.
"This matters because being married and living with a spouse is often tied to caregiving resources, financial stability and day-to-day support, which are incredibly important in old age," said lead author Zoey Wang, a postdoctoral fellow at the Population Studies Center at U-M's Institute for Social Research. "These differences have real implications for how inequality may be reproduced or persist into later life."
Wang and colleagues analyzed data from the Health and Retirement Study (1992-2018), a national survey of 20,000 Americans aged 50 and older. Using an innovative life expectancy-based method, they estimated how many years people spend in different living arrangements, allowing precise comparisons across gender and racial and ethnic groups.
The approach translates demographic patterns into years of life, showing how long each group is likely to spend married, living alone or in other household arrangements.
The analysis found that white older adults spend the most years married-about 25.5 years for men and 18 years for women. Hispanic men and women follow at roughly 23.4 and 15.5 years, respectively. Black men and women spend the fewest years married, at 17.6 and 9.7 years, respectively.
"Black adults are less likely to ever marry and they experience higher rates of divorce, nonmarriage and widowhood," Wang said. "When you add all of that up over decades, it translates into a much higher likelihood of living alone in later life."
As the U.S. older population is becoming more diverse, the Census Bureau projects that racial and ethnic minorities will make up nearly a third of older adults in the near future, researchers said. Understanding these patterns is critical for thinking about policy and planning.
"The most compelling part of this study is really the diversity-there isn't one single later-life experience in America," Wang said. "What intrigued me is how distinct the patterns are across these three groups in their post-50 lives."
Hispanics: A distinct pattern
Hispanic adults are particularly interesting, Wang says. While they often have relatively long marriages, likely influenced by cultural familism, their living arrangements diverge in meaningful ways from both white and Black adults.
"They're not simply in between," she said. "In many cases, their long marriages may be linked, at least partially, to cultural norms around familism. So, multigenerational living arrangements are more common, reflecting strong family networks and economic pressures."
Findings also showed that mostly Black and Hispanic adults-particularly women-are potentially disadvantaged by policies that favor long, continuous marriages. Programs like Social Security spousal and survivor benefits require the marriage to last at least 10 years.
"Groups who spend fewer years married are less likely to benefit fully from those structures," Wang said. "When family life doesn't fit that mold, the financial safety net can be thinner."
Researchers say the U.S. core aging policies were built around a 1950s model of family life: a long-term marriage, often with a male breadwinner and a financially dependent spouse. But the reality in 2026 looks very different.
"A large and growing share of older adults are divorced, never married, widowed or living alone," Wang said. "And these patterns vary by race and gender. So when benefits are heavily tied to marital history, they end up serving some groups much better than others. If we don't change the system, we risk underserving a growing segment of seniors whose lives simply don't fit that model."
To promote equity, policies must reduce reliance on marital history to ensure financial security in later life, she says.
"That could mean strengthening individual-based benefits, expanding caregiving credits or investing more in community-based long-term care that doesn't assume a spouse, " Wang said.
