Single parents tend to earn less money, CSO study suggests

Married parents tend to earn more money than mothers and fathers who are raising children by themselves, a new study from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) suggests.

The study, which examines earnings among parents in Ireland in 2016 and 2022, found median weekly earnings in 2022 were lowest among one-parent families with children at €491.20 and highest among married couples with children at €911.35.

Women in one-parent families with children accounted for 7.1 per cent of total female employments in 2022, while men in one-parent families with children made up 0.7 per cent of total male employments.

This was similar to 2016, when women in one-parent families accounted for 7.9 per cent of total female employments and men in one-parent families accounted for 0.7 per cent of total male employments.

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Median weekly earnings among males in married couples were 35.3 per cent higher in 2022 than among males in one-parent families with children, while females in married couples with children had earnings 63.2 per cent higher than their counterparts in one-parent families.

Weekly earnings were higher among males compared with females across all family unit types.

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The largest earnings gap between female parents in married couples and one-parent families was in the 25-34 years age group where median weekly earnings among women in married couples with children were 102.2 per cent higher than their one-parent counterparts.

The disparity in earnings reduced with age, with the smallest gap in the 55-59 years age cohort with females in a married couple with children earning 18.7 per cent more than those in one-parent families.

In 2022, 15.9 per cent of men in one-parent families had weekly earnings of less than €450 compared with 12.1 per cent of the total male population.

In contrast, almost half (49.1 per cent) of women in one-parent families recorded weekly earnings of less than €450, which was considerably higher than the proportion of the total female population in this earnings bracket (26 per cent).

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