The 10 Cities In Iowa With The Highest Divorce Rates For 2023

Cities with highest divorce rate in Iowa research summary. We analyzed Iowa’s most recent Census data to determine the divorce rate for each city in Iowa based on the percentage of currently divorced residents. Here are the results of our analysis:

• The city with the highest divorce rate in Iowa is Oelwein based on the most recent Census data.

• Oelwein is 16.0% Divorced.

• The city with the lowest divorce rate in Iowa is Storm Lake.

• Storm Lake is 2.0% Divorced.

• Iowa is 7.000000000000001% Divorced.

Table Of Contents: Top Ten | Methodology | Summary | Table

There are some 178,029 people living in Iowa over fifteen years of age who are divorced. You can compare that to the 28,339,199 Americans who are currently divorced in 2023.

Many people decide to run away – or split up – across the Hawkeye State.

Isn’t the divorce rate in America close to 50%? Yes indeed. But we’re measuring something else; we are looking at counts and percentages of people over 15 years old who are currently divorced. That 50% statistic is for the percentage of people who have ever been divorced.

For today’s analysis, the focus will be on the number of currently divorced people.

So now that we have you biting your nails, rethinking your worldview, and pulling out your hair, let’s look at the places in Iowa with the highest rates of divorcees.

Let’s quickly recap before we dive into the Saturday Night Science behind the data.

What is the city in Iowa with the highest divorce rate? That would be Oelwein, with 16.0% of people over 15 years of age being divorced, per the most recent census data.

What is the overall Iowa divorce rate? According to the 2017-2021 Community Survey, the overall divorce rate in Iowa is 7.000000000000001%, which compares to the US divorce rate of 10.9%.

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

For more Iowa reading, check out:

• Best Places To Raise A Family In Iowa
• Richest Cities In Iowa
• Most Dangerous Cities In Iowa

Next 10 Cities

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

Since this is the 58th category of rankings we are compiling for the site, we had a pretty good idea of 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 2017-2021 American Community Survey table S1201 — Marital Status.

Pretty straightforward on that front — we just had to extract the following column of data:

• Population 15 Years and Over -> Divorced

There are some interesting/fun/sad data 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 83 places in Iowa with a population of over 5,000.

We ranked each place by the percentage of divorcees over 15 years of age from highest to lowest. We crowned the divorce capital of Iowa the place with the highest incidence of divorcees, Oelwein.

And if you’re trying to avoid divorce, check out Storm Lake, the city with the lowest divorce rate in Iowa.

We updated this article for 2023 and this is our fifth time ranking the cities in Iowa with the highest divorce rates.