Abbreviated as MDCP; referenced by 2 other explainers
Social marital status shows the de facto relationship status of people aged 15 and over on Census night. It looks at who lives with whom in the home, not at what the law records. It sorts people into three groups: Married in a registered marriage, Married in a de facto marriage, and Not married.
The figures come from Census data. The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects them.
A de facto marriage is a household couple who are not in a registered marriage but live together as a couple. Same-sex de facto couples have always counted in this group. They counted even in years before same-sex registered marriage was legal. To see the legal version of marital status, see the Registered marital status page. The two pages tell different stories. They have different totals. Social marital status leaves out people who live alone or who do not live with a partner.
Kinship structures and shared-living set-ups that are not couples are not shown as a partnership group here. They fall under Not married. So this page can under-count partnered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, CALD, and multigenerational families when ABS does not classify their living set-up as a couple relationship.
The total counts persons aged 15 and over in occupied private dwellings whose household position can be classified. It does not count residents of non-private dwellings, group household residents, or overseas visitors. It leaves out people in non-private dwellings such as hospitals, aged-care homes, hostels, or hotels. It does not count overseas visitors.
Place Forecast stores social marital status at the mesh block level. The ABS Census publishes it at SA1. We split each SA1 across its mesh blocks by the share of persons aged 15+. Then we add the mesh blocks back up to the area you see. So the figures for very small areas are an estimate, not a direct ABS count.
The total here will be smaller than the Registered marital status total for the same area. That is by ABS design. Social marital status is only recorded for persons whose household position can be classified. It leaves out residents of non-private dwellings (aged care, hospitals, student housing), group households, and visitors. Registered marital status, by contrast, is recorded for every person aged 15 and over, no matter where they live.
This total is also smaller than the population aged 15 and over you will see on the population pages. The number here is an unadjusted Census count. The population pages use ABS Estimated Resident Population (ERP).
Each social-marital-status group at the LGA level matches the ABS figure exactly. See LGA anchoring for how this works, the small gap between the page total and ABS's published LGA total, and how very small groups are handled.
The Compare small areas view shows one stacked bar per small area, with the same three groups as colour segments. Use the chart's count and 100% toggle to switch between absolute numbers and shares of each area's total. Filter to a single group to swap the stacked bar for a choropleth and cartograms covering only that group.