sk most people what the divorce rate in Colombia looks like and you will hear some version of the same line: one in three marriages ends in divorce. It is repeated in newspapers, on expat forums and in half the legal blogs on the internet. It is also a figure that almost nobody explains properly, and taken at face value it gives a distorted picture of how Colombian couples separate, why the official count is lower than reality, and what is about to change.
The numbers below come from the Superintendencia de Notariado y Registro, which collects data from the country’s 920 notaries, and from the Registraduria Nacional del Estado Civil, which records civil status entries. They tell a more interesting story than the headline.
The Basic Figures
In 2023, Colombia registered 68,843 marriages against 25,272 divorces. That works out to roughly 69 divorces a day, and it is the source of the famous one-in-three ratio.
The longer trend matters more than any single year. In 2013 the country recorded 17,627 divorces. Ten years later that figure had climbed to 25,272, an increase of about 43 percent over the decade. Across the ten years from January 2012 to December 2021, Colombia registered 601,103 civil marriages and 214,266 divorces.
Then the direction changed. According to the Superintendencia, approximately 159,000 heterosexual couples married in 2024, falling to around 155,000 in 2025. Divorces fell too, dropping 1.9 percent year on year. The superintendent attributed the decline in marriages not to happier relationships but to informality, meaning couples are increasingly skipping the legal ceremony altogether.
| Year | Divorces registered |
|---|---|
| 2011 | 9,244 |
| 2013 | 17,627 |
| 2023 | 25,272 |
| 2025 | Down 1.9% year on year |
Why “One in Three” Is Not a Divorce Rate
This is where most articles on the subject go wrong. Comparing the number of divorces filed in a given year against the number of marriages celebrated in that same year is not a divorce rate. The couples divorcing in 2023 mostly married in the 1990s and 2000s. The couples marrying in 2023 will mostly divorce, if they do, sometime in the 2030s. Dividing one by the other compares two entirely different populations.
A real divorce rate follows a marriage cohort across time, and Colombia does not publish that data in any consistent form. So the honest answer to “what is the divorce rate in Colombia” is that the country publishes annual volumes rather than a true rate, and the ratio you see quoted everywhere is a rough proxy at best.
There is a second problem, and it is bigger. Colombia has one of the highest rates of informal union in Latin America. Enormous numbers of couples live in a union marital de hecho, a common-law partnership that carries real property consequences after two years of cohabitation but requires no ceremony to start and no divorce to end. Those separations never appear in any divorce statistic. Whatever the official numbers say, the true rate of relationship breakdown in Colombia is considerably higher, and invisible.
Access explains part of the gap as well. The country’s 920 notaries are concentrated in the Andean region, the major cities and a handful of coastal centres. In much of rural Colombia there is no practical way to formalise a marriage or dissolve one, which suppresses both figures at once.
A final oddity worth knowing: the Registraduria recorded 85,822 marriages in 2024 but only 109 divorces in its own database. That is not a contradiction of the notarial figures. It reflects how many people complete a divorce and never register the change to their civil status, which creates genuine legal problems later when they try to remarry, sell property or claim a pension.
The 2026 Wild Card: Unilateral Divorce
Everything above describes the old system. On 27 December 2024, Colombia passed Law 2442, adding a tenth ground to article 154 of the Civil Code: the sole will of either spouse.
Before this, a divorce without mutual consent required proving fault. You had to demonstrate adultery, domestic violence, abandonment, habitual drunkenness or two years of separation, and contested cases routinely dragged on for years. Now either spouse can file at any moment, without the other’s agreement and without alleging any cause. The petition needs only a proposal setting out how the consequences of the separation will be handled.
The law preserved the protections around it. Property rights remain intact, obligations toward children are unchanged, and a spouse left without means of subsistence retains a maintenance claim, provided they do not enter a new marriage or partnership. Judges are also directed to review maintenance arrangements on their own initiative where minors are involved, and to look for signs of risk to a spouse.
One practical distinction matters. A unilateral divorce under the new ground ten goes before a family court, not a notary. Notarial divorce, the fast and inexpensive route, still requires both spouses to agree. The law does allow a case that started as unilateral to be finished before a notary if the couple later agrees to convert it.
The Superintendencia has forecast that divorce numbers will rise in 2026 as a direct result. That expectation is reasonable. Every country that has moved from fault-based to no-fault divorce has seen a spike, largely made up of dead marriages that had been waiting for a legal exit.
Same-Sex Marriage and Divorce in Colombia
Colombia has recognised same-sex civil marriage since the Constitutional Court settled the question on 28 April 2016, following the earlier ruling in C-577 of 2011 that had already opened the door for couples to formalise their unions before judges and notaries from 2013.
The volumes are small but the pattern is striking. Between 2016 and 2021, of 341,502 civil marriages celebrated nationally, 1,703 were between same-sex couples, and only 22 of those had been dissolved within the period. In 2022, 1,546 same-sex couples married, the highest annual figure since legalisation. In 2023 the number was 671, made up of 345 marriages between women and 326 between men, out of 69,456 civil marriages in total.
The clearest comparison comes from the Superintendencia’s own analysis covering January 2023 to April 2024. In that window, heterosexual couples registered 88,069 marriages and 32,567 divorces, or roughly 37 divorces for every 100 marriages. Same-sex couples registered 918 marriages, 477 between women and 441 between men, and 35 dissolutions, or roughly four per 100.
Read that carefully, because the comparison is looser than it looks. Both figures compare divorces in a period to marriages in the same period, and the same-sex cohort is far younger, with almost no marriages older than eight years contributing to the divorce column. Time alone would push the number up. Even so, officials have described same-sex unions as showing greater stability, and international research on this question tends to point in the same direction.
Geography is consistent across both groups. Same-sex marriage in Colombia is overwhelmingly urban, concentrated in Bogota, Antioquia, Valle del Cauca and the coffee region, with several departments recording zero or one in a given year.
The 2025 data introduced a note of caution. Same-sex marriages fell by 20 percent that year, a much steeper decline than the drop among heterosexual couples, with divorces among those couples falling by a smaller proportion.
Foreign Nationals Married to Colombians: The Missing Number
Here is the honest answer to a question a lot of people search for. Colombia does not publish divorce statistics broken down by the nationality of the spouses. The Registraduria records civil marriages between a Colombian and a foreigner in the same database as any other, and no public series separates them out. Anyone quoting you a specific divorce rate for foreigners who marry Colombians is inventing it.
What can be said is that the population is large and growing. Binational relationships have expanded sharply alongside remote work, retirement migration and the tourism boom in Medellin, Cartagena and Bogota, and the spousal category of the Colombian migrant visa is one of the more heavily used routes for foreigners settling in the country.
What can also be said is that when these marriages fail, they fail more expensively. The legal exposure is structurally different, and it catches people out in four predictable ways.
The first is jurisdiction. A foreigner domiciled in Colombia can generally be sued for divorce in a Colombian family court, whatever their nationality and wherever the wedding took place. Living in Medellin does not keep your marriage under the law of the country you came from.
The second is the marital property regime. Unless the couple signed capitulaciones matrimoniales before marrying, a sociedad conyugal forms automatically and covers assets acquired during the marriage. Foreigners frequently assume that property purchased in their own name, or with money brought from abroad, sits outside the estate. Often it does not, and the analysis turns on when and how the asset was acquired rather than whose name is on the title.
The third is recognition across borders. A divorce granted abroad has no automatic effect in Colombia. It must go through exequatur before the Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, supported by an apostilled and officially translated judgment, before the Colombian civil registry will reflect it. Until that happens, a person can be legally divorced in one country and still married in another, which creates serious problems for remarriage, inheritance and property transfers. The same applies in reverse to a marriage celebrated abroad, which must be registered in Colombia before it produces any effect here.
A foreign spouse dealing with two legal systems at once is usually better served by an English-speaking divorce lawyer in Colombia who has taken exequatur applications through the Supreme Court before, rather than by a purely domestic practitioner in either country. The procedural requirements are unforgiving, a rejected application means starting the whole process again, and the delay is measured in months rather than weeks.
The fourth is immigration status. A foreign spouse whose right to remain in Colombia rests on the marriage loses the basis for that visa when the marriage ends. Under the old law, that outcome required either consent or a proven ground. Under Law 2442, it can now be triggered by one spouse alone, with no cause given. That is a meaningful shift in the position of foreign spouses, and it has not received much attention.
Where children are involved, everything above becomes more serious. Colombia is party to the Hague Convention on international child abduction, minors need authorisation to leave the country when one parent is not travelling with them, and custody arrangements agreed informally between parents carry little weight once a dispute reaches a judge. These are the cases where early legal advice makes the largest practical difference, because the decisions made in the first weeks tend to determine the shape of everything that follows.
Where the Numbers Are Heading
Three forces are pulling in different directions. Marriage itself is declining as informal unions replace it, which shrinks the pool of marriages that can produce a divorce. Notarial access remains concentrated in wealthy urban regions, suppressing both figures across much of the country. And unilateral divorce has removed the single largest obstacle to ending a marriage, which should push filings up from 2026 onward.
The most likely outcome is a rising number of divorces set against a shrinking number of marriages, which will make the one-in-three ratio look worse each year while telling you very little about whether Colombian relationships are actually less durable than before. The more useful measure would be how long marriages last and how many separations happen outside the formal system entirely. Neither figure is published, and until they are, the divorce rate in Colombia will remain a number that is quoted far more confidently than it deserves.
