can you provide a percent of married parents per high population density cities in usa... I am dealing with is the seeming prevalence of parents in long-term relationships who do not marry,

Can you provide a percent of married parents per high population density cities in usa...

There isn’t a ready-made statistic that says “X% of parents are married in high‑density U.S. cities” as a single number; you have to derive it from Census/ACS city‑level tables. But a few points can be stated clearly.data.census+2

National baseline

• In 2022, about 65% of U.S. children lived with two married parents, nationally.census+1

• ACS 5‑year data show roughly 60 million married‑couple households, with about 23 million having children under 18; that’s about 38% of married‑couple households having resident children.data.census

What this implies for big, dense cities

For specific cities, you must query ACS tables (e.g., DP02, B11005) by place: they give, for each city, the share of households that are married‑couple households, and the subset with children. In practice:metrocouncil+1

• Large, dense “core” cities (NYC, Chicago, LA, etc.) tend to have lower shares of married‑couple‑with‑children households than the national average, because they have more singles, childless couples, and non‑family households.census+1

• Suburbs and some Sunbelt / Western metros have higher shares where 25–30%+ of all households are married couples with children; in only 18 of the 100 largest metros did such households exceed a quarter of all households in 2008.brookings

How to get exact percentages

To answer the question precisely for, say, “high‑density cities over 500,000 population,” you would:

1. Go to data.census.gov and load table B11005 or DP02.metrocouncil+1

2. Filter “Geography” by “Place” and select the cities of interest (e.g., New York, San Francisco, Boston, etc.).

3. Compute:

   • married‑couple households with own children ÷ all households with own children = percent of parents who are married in that city.

Because that step has to be repeated city by city, no single published percentage exists; but nationally ~65% of children with married parents is a good reference, with dense core cities generally running below that and their surrounding suburbs often above it.childstats+3

Thx. What I am dealing with is the seeming prevalence of parents in long-term relationships who do not marry, and most  likely  report themselves as being as not having a live-in BF,  and which is related to the financial advantage not being married has, which you have documented. 

Which is corespondent to the rise of welfare. In 2023, nearly one in four children in America aged 0‒17 years, totaling about 19 million, were living in a household without their biological, step, or adoptive father, mostly with their mother (85% of cases). In fact, living in a single-parent households with a father absent is the second most common U.S. living arrangement, and the proportion of these households has doubled since 1970 (US Census Bureau, 2023) - [https://www.niussp.org/family-and-households/americas-single-parent-households-and-missing-fathers/](https://www.niussp.org/family-and-households/americas-single-parent-households-and-missing-fathers/)

The pattern you’re seeing—many mothers effectively in long‑term relationships but not married, often with fathers off the official books—is very much in line with current data on cohabitation, “missing fathers,” and welfare incentives.niussp+2

What the recent data show

• In 2023, about 1 in 4 U.S. children (≈19 million) lived in a household without their biological, step, or adoptive father; 85% of these lived with their mother.fatherhood+1

• The share of children in father‑absent homes has more than doubled since 1970, and single‑parent (mostly mother‑only) homes are now the second most common living arrangement.niussp

• In 2022–23, about 70% of children lived with two parents, but only 65% with two married parents and about 5% with two cohabiting parents, with cohabiting‑parent numbers rising over time.census+1

Critically for your point:

• Many births to unmarried women occur in cohabiting unions, but these unions “fail at twice the rate of marriages,” feeding the single‑mother statistics and “missing father” problem.niussp

• Official CPS/ACS categories will count such a household as “single mother” once the cohabitation ends, and in some cases fathers may be informally present or intermittently resident in ways surveys under‑capture, reinforcing the sense that the reality on the ground is more “quasi‑partnered” than the labels suggest.census+1

Welfare and marriage/cohabitation incentives

Research on welfare design supports your concern that there can be a financial advantage to not marrying formally, especially in the lower‑middle ranges of income:

• An AEI/IFS analysis of couples with a youngest child under two found that about 82% of couples in the second and third income quintiles (roughly $24k–$79k) face a marriage penalty in means‑tested benefits (Medicaid, cash welfare, food stamps) if they marry; only about 66% in the bottom quintile face such a penalty.ifstudies+1

• Earlier work on AFDC found that program rules were relatively lenient toward cohabitors compared to husbands, meaning that “discouragement of marriage by the AFDC system may lead to increased cohabitation rather than increased female headship,” and that cohabitation was effectively encouraged in some states.irp.wisc

• More recent family‑policy reports argue that welfare design often makes “more financial sense for them to cohabit rather than marry,” especially when combining benefits, tax credits, and eligibility thresholds.heritage+1

So your intuition is well grounded: the system tends to:

• Make formal marriage economically costly for many lower‑to‑lower‑middle income couples.

• Leave cohabitation / informal partnerships as the “rational” choice, which then show up in data as unmarried parents and, when the relationship dissolves, as single‑mother households with absent fathers.ifstudies+2...

You could summarize the situation like this:

• “Official statistics now show about a quarter of U.S. children living without a resident father, and the share of such households has more than doubled since 1970. Much of this is tied to births outside marriage and cohabiting unions that break up at twice the rate of marriages. At the same time, welfare and tax rules often impose a marriage penalty—for many low‑ to moderate‑income couples, marrying means losing thousands of dollars in benefits they could keep by remaining unmarried or loosely cohabiting. So the rise of ‘single’ or informally partnered mothers is not just a moral or cultural shift; it is structurally reinforced by policy design that makes fatherlessness and non‑marital unions financially safer than stable, formal marriage for exactly the families least able to absorb the penalty.”irp.wisc+3...

   for the items just discussed, key links are:

  • America’s single-parent households and missing fathers – N‑IUSSP: https://www.niussp.org/family-and-households/americas-single-parent-households-and-missing-fathers/

  • U.S. Census – children’s living arrangements: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/parents-living-arrangements.html

  • Census press release on children living with two parents: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/children-families-living-arrangements.html

  • Marriage, Penalized? Social‑welfare policy and family formation (AEI/IFS): https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/marriage-penalized-does-social-welfare-policy-affect-family-formation

  • Beyond Single Mothers: Cohabitation, Marriage, and the U.S. Welfare System (Wisconsin IRP PDF): https://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/dps/pdfs/dp106895.pdf