Romania's statistics office records, for every marriage, the age of the groom and the age of the bride, grouped into five-year bands. Lined up for every year from 1990 to 2025, the hundred possible combinations form a grid you can walk through with a single control: the year.
bride's age (top row) · groom's age (left column)
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In 1990, almost three marriages in ten — 29.75% — had a bride under 20: 57,323 of the 192,652 recorded that year. In 2025 the figure is 4.50%, one in twenty-two: 4,310 of 95,713. On the grid, the left-hand column, nearly solid thirty-five years ago, has almost emptied out.
The peak of the grid moved up a row
The single most common age pairing shifted too. In 1990, the largest group of marriages — 31.90% of the total — paired a groom aged 20-24 with a bride the same age. In 2025 the grid's peak sits at 25-29 for both spouses, but at a nearly halved concentration, 14.59% of the total: marriages moved later and spread across more age combinations.
One thing has barely moved: the odds that both spouses fall in the same five-year band. It was 42.3% of 1990's marriages; it is 39.2% of 2025's. The age at which Romanians marry has shifted substantially, while the typical age gap between spouses has stayed almost the same.
Method and sources
The data comes from matrix POP210B of Romania's National Institute of Statistics (TEMPO-Online), "Marriages by spouses' age group," with every groom-age × bride-age combination for each year from 1990 to 2025. Age bands are five-year intervals, not exact ages. One value in the series (brides aged 45-49, year 2002, on the "total" row) looks like a reporting anomaly against neighboring years and was not used in any published figure here.
Source: statistici.insse.ro, matrix POP210B.