U.S. Marriages Rising as Same-Sex Couples Now Counted in Report

(Bloomberg) -- Four years after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriages nationally, the Labor Department’s survey started including married gays and lesbians as part of their count of married people.

With the change, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey showed a slight uptick of more than 300,000 in the overall number of married people. The figures don’t break out the number of gays and lesbians who have married since the June 2015 court decision, but represent an important step in the government taking note of same-sex couples, said Meghan Maury, policy director for the National LGBTQ Task Force.

“We’ll get much better data about the number of people in same-sex couples from the 2020 Census, which includes new response options in the ‘relationship to householder’ question this year,” Maury said.

--With assistance from Chris Middleton.

To contact the reporter on this story: Steve Matthews in Atlanta at smatthews@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alister Bull at abull7@bloomberg.net, Anita Sharpe

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