Three-quarters of Aussie couples shun formal church weddings: report

Australians have continued to turn their backs on formal church weddings in favor of less formal civil ceremonies, new data has shown.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on Wednesday released a wide-ranging report into the nation's marriage and divorce trends.

The report found that the number of couples shunning traditional wedding ceremonies in a church, usually conducted by a priest, was at an all-time high, with almost three-quarters (74.1 percent) of marriage ceremonies performed by civil celebrants in 2014. The percentage of civil celebrant weddings in 2013 was 72.5.

According to the ABS, civil celebrants have overseen more than half of Australia's weddings every year since 1999.

In the findings, the ABS discovered that April 12 last year marked the day when most Australians were married in 2014. Of the 121,197 Australian couples who married last year, 2,056 got hitched on that particular Saturday.

"Most marriages take place in spring and autumn with almost two-thirds of all marriages occurring in these seasons," Assistant Director of the ABS, Paull Hoffmann, said in the report on Wednesday.

Hoffmann said the median marriage age of men (31.5 years) and women (29.6) had remained stable over the past decade, after gradually increasing before the turn of the millennium.

The divorce rate in Australia increased by 2.4 percent from 2013, with an additional 1,140 more couples separating in 2014.

Those couples who divorced broke off the marriage, on average 12 years after first reciting their vows. Endit