The 10 Cities In Illinois With The Highest Divorce Rates For 2021

If you're married, the thought of divorce has probably popped into your mind at least once.

Come on, admit it.

And if you're not married, let me tell you that there's gonna be a point at 2 a.m. when you have a crying baby and haven't slept in two months that it's gonna run through your head to run.

Far.

Away.

But, don't just take my word for it, take the word of the some 612,990 people living in Illinois over fifteen years of age who are divorced. Or compare that to the 28,339,199 dAmericans who are already divorced in 2021.

A lot of people make the decision to run away - or simply split up - across the Prairie State.

Isn't the divorce rate in America close to 50%? Yes indeed. But that's not quite what we're measuring; we are looking at counts and percentages of people over 15 years old who are currently divorced.

You typically calculate that 50% statistic as percent of marriages.

But we are just going to focus on the actual number of divorced people today -- what better way to measure marital misery than the straight count of people in Illinois it affects?

So now that we have you biting your nails, rethinking your world view, and pulling out your hair, let's take a look at the places in Illinois with highest rates of divorcees.

Let's quickly recap before we dive into the methodology and a closer look at the top ten places in IL.

What is the city in Illinois with the highest divorce rate? That would be West Frankfort, with 17.0% of people over 15 years of age being divorced, per the most recent census data.

What is the overall Illinois divorce rate? According to the 2015-2019 Community Survey, the overall divorce rate in Illinois is 6.0%, which compares to the US divorce rate of 10.9%.

Alrighty, on to how we calculated the places with the highest divorce rates in Illinois.

For more Illinois reading, check out:

• Best Places To Raise A Family In Illinois
• Safest Places In Illinois
• Cheapest Places To Live In Illinois

Next 10 Cities

How We Determined The Places In Illinois That Get Un-Hitched The Most

Since that this is the 58th category of rankings we are compiling for the site, we had a pretty good idea where to find data on marriage and divorce in America — the U.S. Census Bureau. Because who likes tracking misery more than the U.S. government?

Specifically, we looked at the 2015-2019 American Community Survey specifically table S1201 -- Marital Status.

Pretty straight forward on that front -- we just had to extract the following column of data:

• Population 15 Years and Over -> Divorced

There's some kinda interesting/fun/sad data in there like .1% of female Americans aged 15-19 are divorced, but 0% of males (That's probably a rounding issue, but still).

But the national data is for another day, today the analysis focuses on the 336 places in Illinois with a population of over 5,000.

We ranked each of these places by the percentage of divorcees over 15 years of age from highest to lowest. We crowned the divorce capital of Illinois the place with the highest incidence of divorcees, West Frankfort.

And if you're trying to avoid divorce, check out Wilmette, the city with the lowest divorce rate in Illinois.

Getting Some Closure In Illinois After Untying The Know

Besides just coming up with what we thought would be a great new blog/book title, "Untying the Knot In Illinois: Life After Divorce", we now have a sense of what places in the Prairie State don't pay much attention to the whole "'til death do we part" phrase.

Try to keep in mind that the reason cities rank where they do in Illinois could be because of the age, education, and income distribution, as all of those things impact the rate of divorce.

And, in all honestly, that's probably for the best. It's much better to get out of a toxic relationship than stay it.

Just make sure you have your running shoes ready to go.

For more Illinois reading, check out:

• Best Places To Raise A Family In Illinois
• Safest Places In Illinois
• Cheapest Places To Live In Illinois