Prenups go mainstream as younger couples embrace financial clarity before marriage

Celine Tsoi was twenty-three when she met Charles Mock in Goleta, California. Eight months into their relationship, they were engaged. When friends asked if they were getting a prenup, the question didn't feel like an insult—it felt practical. "A lot of things could happen in a marriage and you want to discuss them when you still love each other rather than when things go bad and you want to take revenge," Celine says now.

What was once the domain of the wealthy and famous has become ordinary. Around one in three young couples in the UK are now signing prenuptial agreements, a shift that reflects something deeper than financial caution: a generation rethinking how to build a marriage on a foundation of clarity rather than assumption. In the United States, the numbers are even starker. Nearly half of married millennials and more than one in three Gen Z adults report having a prenup. Overall, one in five American married couples has one. In Britain, where courts have only recently begun to recognize prenups with greater consistency, the figure sits at one in ten across all ages—but among couples under thirty-five, it jumps to one in three.

Charles, a nurse, earns more than Celine, who is pursuing her PhD. She had saved more money than he had. The disparities were modest. Yet they wanted to address the hard questions early, when affection still governed the conversation. What moved Celine most was that Charles insisted the prenup protect her claim to the house if they ever separated. For her, the document became something else entirely: a window into his character. "Just having the conversation can show you what the person you're going to marry is like," she says.

Mark Gilmartin, a lawyer at JMW Solicitors in London, has watched demand for prenups surge in the past eighteen months. The old stereotype—billionaire marrying bartender—has given way to something far more democratic. Start-up founders, entrepreneurs, influencers, and what he calls "every-day you and I" couples are now seeking his counsel. Many are protecting inherited wealth, assets they expect to receive from parents as part of what financial planners call the Great Wealth Transfer. "It's the attempts to protect the fruits of what's going to be, rather than what is," Gilmartin says.

Becca Gibson from West Sussex is marrying Dave Howells in days. Dave earns £130,000 annually in finance—more than three times what Becca makes from her eyelash extension business. She has three children from a previous marriage; he has one. A court might award her a better settlement given the income gap and her dependent children, but Becca was drawn to the prenup for a different reason. Her first marriage "didn't end very well." She expects to inherit significant property from her parents and wants to ensure that if the marriage fails, each of them walks away with what they brought into it. "It's not an advantage for me," she says, "but it's a fair situation." Dave, forty-five, frames it more bluntly. He built his home, his pension, his future. He was independent when they met. Why should a divorce court redistribute what he had already secured? "A court of law could potentially say, hang on, this guy's earning a lot more than her, he needs to pay her," he says. "I'm no different now to when I met her, and yet she was independent."

What has made prenups accessible to ordinary couples is technology. Dave initially consulted a traditional law firm and expected to pay around £5,000. He switched instead to Wenup, a semi-automated online platform, and paid £1,600. The cost barrier that once confined prenups to the wealthy has crumbled. Julia Rodgers, cofounder of the US platform HelloPrenup, notes that couples are marrying later in life—by their mid-thirties, many have accumulated university debt, started businesses, or bought homes. They have far more to lose. Parents, watching their own children navigate these complexities, often push for prenups themselves, wanting to protect the inheritances they plan to pass down.

Lawyers point to another driver: the pain of previous divorces. Many couples have witnessed their parents' separations or endured their own. They want to avoid that wreckage. Prenups, once criticized for limiting women's rights, have evolved. Rodgers argues they now empower women by forcing transparent conversations about finances, roles, and life goals before marriage rather than in the wreckage of divorce. "We want to make sure we have the honest, open, transparent conversations about life goals, about finances, about roles and responsibilities in the home, so that we can have a long, happy marriage and not end up in that position that we saw our parents in," she says.

Celine spent only a few hundred dollars on her prenup through an online service. She considers it an investment in her marriage—more important, perhaps, than the wedding itself. Most of her friends think prenups are sensible. Best of all, she and Charles have already had the conversations that derail so many marriages. "We haven't had a single argument about finances," she says.