A 2025 National Center for Family & Marriage Research (NCFMR) found just under 987,000 women divorced in 2024, down from 993,000 in 2023. Today, about 41 percent of first marriages end in divorce, according to longstanding estimates from sources including the American Psychological Association.
If a spouse is planning to end their marriage, filing for divorce requires proper procedures to follow. In these situations, understanding your state’s laws is necessary. The grounds can directly influence how a court divides marital property, whether alimony is awarded, and in some jurisdictions, how custody is determined. Choosing between a fault and no-fault filing is a strategic legal decision, not simply an emotional one.
What are the grounds for divorce you can use to meet the legal requirements to petition the court? Understanding your options is important so you can make decisions with full information.
No-fault divorce, available in all 50 states
Resolving a divorce, legal separation, or termination of a domestic partnership may sometimes require court intervention. This is particularly true when the parties cannot reach an agreement on important issues. These are just the cases that San Jose divorce lawyer Rod Firoozye and their law firm handle.
All 50 states in America have approved no-fault divorce filing. In this type of divorce, the spouse who wants to end the marriage does not need to prove any wrongdoing by the other. Instead, what one needs to establish is why the marriage is not viable. Examples of valid reasons include irretrievable breakdown in the marriage or irreconcilable differences in the involved parties. Another reason is that both spouses have lived separately for a defined statutory period, depending on the state’s law.
Unlike the pre-1970s regime, where courts would require proof of adultery, abandonment or cruelty before granting a divorce, no-fault divorce greatly facilitated access to dissolution. No-fault filings are usually less expensive, cause less conflict between the parties and usually move through the court system faster than contested fault-based cases because no misconduct needs to be proven.
Some states are exclusively no-fault, offering no fault-based grounds at all. Others make no-fault available alongside fault-based options. The specific rules, including any required separation period before filing, vary by state.
Fault-based grounds, when they still apply and why they matter
Roughly two-thirds of the states still allow a fault divorce as an option, or in combination with the no-fault option. Commonly recognized fault grounds vary by state. Adultery, physical cruelty, mental cruelty, abandonment for a set period, imprisonment, and habitual substance abuse are some of the grounds often used in fault-based cases.
To maintain an action on fault bases, the petitioner must set forth the basis for fault in the complaint. If the fault basis is contested, the petitioner must prove it in court. Depending on state law, the responding spouse may also be able to raise defenses. Condonation means that the conduct was forgiven. Recrimination involves similar misconduct by the petitioner, or connivance, which involves encouraging or consenting to the conduct. These additional legal and evidentiary issues can make a contested fault-based divorce more complex and potentially pricier than a no-fault divorce.
The question worth examining is not whether fault grounds are available but whether using them produces a materially different financial outcome than a no-fault filing in the same jurisdiction.
How fault actually affects property division and alimony
This is the part most general divorce guides understate and where the choice between fault and no-fault has real financial consequences.
In some states, proven adultery creates a statutory bar to an award of permanent spousal support to the at-fault spouse. That bar is not absolute. Even when adultery has been proven as fault, a court can still award alimony if it concludes, by clear and convincing evidence, that it would be an inequity without support, given how the parties’ fault and economics compare.
Appellate courts overturned the decisions of trial courts on several occasions, alleging that the exception was not appropriately revoked. This reflects the idea that the bar does cause a hardship, but not in every case and not as an automatic remedial measure. There are jurisdictions where a fault finding can shift property division from roughly equal toward a larger share of the marital estate for the innocent spouse but the degree to which courts actually apply fault this way in practice varies with the facts of the case.
The financial impact flows from whether the jurisdiction treats fault as relevant to equitable distribution. In states where blame for the breakdown of the marriage is taken into account in property division decisions, judges are permitted to give more property to the spouse who did not engage in marital misconduct. A jurisdiction that takes into account fault when determining alimony may increase or decrease the amount of the alimony award and its duration. These states may also stop the payment of alimony to the at-fault advancing party. States that treat divorce proceedings as purely economic regardless of marital conduct will not produce these outcomes, regardless of whether fault grounds are technically available.
The decision to file on fault grounds requires knowing not just whether fault is a recognized ground in the state but also whether the courts in that state actually use fault findings to alter financial outcomes. A fault filing that costs more in legal fees and takes longer to litigate is only worthwhile if the financial recovery justifies those costs.
Common fault grounds and what courts require to prove them
The evidentiary requirements for each fault ground differ, and courts scrutinize this evidence closely.
Adultery typically requires circumstantial evidence establishing opportunity and inclination but some states allow direct evidence. Communications, records of hotel stays, witness testimony, and similar documentation can serve as evidence. The standard of proof in most states is clear and convincing evidence rather than a preponderance.
Cruelty claims differ by type. Proving physical cruelty requires physical evidence like medical reports, pictures and police reports. Meanwhile, states have not often clearly worked out evidentiary matters about mental cruelty, since no uniform standard exists across the various states. Some states may necessitate the infliction of behavioral actions harming the body or mind of the complainant instead of merely experiencing emotional hardships in matrimony.
Abandonment laws in most states require a clear period of deliberate and voluntary separation from the matrimonial home where such leave is granted without any reasonable cause. There must be a presentation of proof that establishes the voluntary nature of the departure. Evidence must also show that the absent spouse intended to terminate the marriage and that the petitioner did not consent to the separation.
Imprisonment or incarceration is recognized by many states as a fault ground when a conviction and sentence of specified length are shown. Keep in mind that the specifics of which convictions qualify and how long the sentence vary by statute.
A changing legal picture, recent state reforms
No-fault divorce is legally secure in all 50 states as of 2025, but the surrounding policy debate is more active than it has been in decades. Several state legislatures have introduced bills to restrict or eliminate no-fault divorce. Some states introduced legislation in early 2024 that would require proof of fault as a prerequisite for divorce, while others have discussed eliminating no-fault divorce entirely. None of these proposals have become law, but the legislative activity signals that state-specific divorce law will continue to evolve.
As a matter of fact, in 2025, the no-fault divorce system is still in place in all the 50 states but discussions about its policy are starting to get more active compared to previous decades. Several states, such as Oklahoma, have passed and even attempted to pass various restrictions on no-fault marriage annulments. Some of them would require the spouses to support perjury against the divorce, while the last option is a complete crackdown on no-fault divorces. None of the proposed laws have been passed yet, but the arguments show that the laws concerning divorce can differ in their processing applications or their terms in the country.
The legal reform surrounding the legal grounds for divorce reflects a trend in some states toward simplifying the divorce process and reducing the adversarial element of dissolution proceedings. The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute maintains an overview of fault divorce definitions and the general legal framework that applies across jurisdictions.
The practical implication is that the rules governing divorce grounds are not static. The rules that apply in a specific state today may not be the rules that applied five years ago, and they may not be the rules that apply in five years.
The choice between fault-based and no-fault divorce grounds is not a matter of assigning blame for its own sake. It is a legal and financial decision that depends on what the applicable state’s courts actually do with a fault finding. In states where proven fault changes how property is divided or affects alimony rights, the evidentiary effort required to establish fault may be worthwhile. In states where divorce proceedings treat misconduct as largely irrelevant to financial outcomes, the additional cost and conflict of a fault-based filing produces little corresponding benefit.
Understanding which category a specific jurisdiction falls into is the starting point for making that decision in a way that serves the client’s actual interests rather than the emotional impulse to assign responsibility for the marriage’s failure.