Grounds for divorce: what counts?

There aren't any. Not any more.

Since 6 April 2022, England and Wales has had no grounds for divorce, no facts to prove, and no requirement to say what went wrong. You cannot cite adultery. You cannot cite unreasonable behaviour. There is no box on the form for the thing you have been rehearsing in your head for two years.

If you came here to find out which reason to give, the answer is: none. You state that the marriage has broken down irretrievably, and the court takes your word for it.

For most people this is a relief once it lands. It also raises the question everybody actually wants answered, which is whether your husband or wife can stop you. They can't. That's further down.

Need help? Our divorce support page lists numbers to call and organisations you can reach out to.

What you have to say instead

You make a statement of irretrievable breakdown. That's the whole of it - a declaration that the marriage has ended and isn't recoverable.

You don't have to explain it. You don't have to evidence it. Nobody will ask you to describe an incident, produce a text message, or account for what happened at your sister's wedding in 2019. The court does not investigate whether you're right, and there is no threshold you have to clear.

You can make that statement on your own, as a sole applicant, or together with your spouse as a joint application.

What you do still need

The requirements now are about eligibility rather than blame:

• You've been married for over a year. This is a hard limit - you cannot apply before your first anniversary, regardless of circumstances.

• The marriage has permanently broken down. Your statement, your judgement.

• Your marriage is legally recognised in the UK. Including same-sex marriage.

• The UK is your permanent home, or you or your spouse live in England or Wales.

That's it. If those four things are true, you can apply.

What this replaced

Until April 2022 there was technically one ground - irretrievable breakdown - but you couldn't just assert it. You had to prove it with one of five facts:

• Adultery

• Unreasonable behaviour

• Desertion for two years

• Two years' separation, with your spouse's consent

• Five years' separation, without it

In practice this meant that anyone who wanted a divorce sooner than two years had to blame someone. Since most people don't want to wait two years, most divorces began with one person writing a list of the other person's failings and posting it to a court - which is a spectacularly bad way to start the conversation about who gets the house.

The two-year and five-year options were the civilised route, and they required either your spouse's cooperation or half a decade of your life.

The case that changed it

Tini Owens married Hugh Owens in 1978. In 2015 she applied for a divorce on the basis of unreasonable behaviour, setting out 27 examples of how he had treated her.

He defended it. The judge decided her examples were "flimsy and exaggerated" - the kind of thing to be expected in a marriage - and refused the divorce. She appealed, and lost. She appealed again, to the Supreme Court, which in July 2018 upheld the refusal while making clear how uncomfortable it was about doing so.

The outcome was that a woman who wanted to leave her marriage was told by the highest court in the country that she had not been treated badly enough to be allowed to, and would have to remain married until five years' separation had elapsed.

The public reaction to that is why the law changed. The Divorce, Dissolution and Separation Act 2020 followed, and came into force in April 2022.

Worth knowing, if you've been carrying a sense that you ought to have a better reason: the whole point of the current law is that you don't need one.

Can your husband or wife refuse?

No. This is the single biggest thing the reform changed, and it's the question underneath most searches that land on this page.

Under the old law a divorce could be defended, as Hugh Owens defended his. Under the current law it cannot be contested on the basis that someone doesn't want it. "I don't agree" is not a legal position.

A respondent can dispute the application only on narrow, technical grounds:

• The court doesn't have jurisdiction - for instance, neither of you is sufficiently connected to England or Wales

• The marriage was never legally valid

• The marriage has already been legally ended

• There's been a procedural or fraudulent irregularity

None of these is about whether the marriage has broken down. They're about whether this court can deal with this marriage.

What a reluctant spouse can do is fail to engage - ignore the paperwork, be slow, be obstructive. That costs you time and money rather than the outcome, and there are established routes around it. The divorce still happens.

Does it matter who was at fault?

For the divorce itself: no, not at all.

For the money: almost never, though this is the point at which people most want it to.

Financial settlements are decided under section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, which lists what a court weighs - the welfare of any children, each person's income and earning capacity, needs, contributions to the marriage including non-financial ones, and the standard of living you had. Adultery isn't on that list.

Conduct can be considered, but only where it would be "inequitable to disregard" it - a deliberately high bar that in practice means violence, abuse, or serious financial misconduct rather than betrayal. The court's job is to reach a fair outcome, not to establish who behaved worse.

The one place an affair can touch the money is if marital assets were spent on it. That's a financial argument about dissipated assets, not a moral one about cheating, and it's assessed as such.

If you believe conduct in your case genuinely reaches that threshold, that is a conversation to have with a solicitor rather than a question to settle from a website. For nearly everyone reading this, the honest answer is that the law will not be the place you get your acknowledgement.

Where "grounds" still exists

One place: annulment. A marriage can be annulled if it was never legally valid, or if it's voidable for particular reasons. Annulment does have grounds, and they're specific. It's a different application from a divorce and it's rare.

If you're looking for grounds because you think your marriage may not have been valid in the first place, that's the route to look at rather than this one.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

Both have separate systems. Scotland retained a fault-based element alongside separation-based routes, so grounds there are still a live concept. Northern Ireland likewise did not adopt the England and Wales reform. Everything above applies to England and Wales only.

Last reviewed: September 2026. This page explains the law as it stands in England and Wales - it isn't legal advice about your marriage.

Sources: Gov.UK grounds for divorce, Gov.UK what happens after you apply, Owens vs Owens [2018]