No published survey directly measures regret among divorced adults who lacked a prenuptial agreement; the ~15% inaction figure shown here is a constructed proxy, inferred from prenup-adoption and attitude data rather than a retrospective regret question. LawDepot’s own survey reports adoption, not regret (85% of ever-married respondents said they had never signed a prenup). The action side is harder still to pin down, because no published survey measures regret among people who actually signed a prenup. What the literature does measure is the perception cost of asking: in a Harvard study by Heather Mahar, 63.7% of the general public said they would believe divorce was more likely if a partner asked them to sign a prenuptial agreement. These two numbers measure different things — a perception about a request versus a retrospective regret among the divorced — so the gap between them is directional context, not a clean like-for-like comparison.
Prenup adoption has risen sharply even as the signaling stigma persists: a 2022 Harris Poll found 15% of married or engaged Americans had signed one, up from just 3% in 2010. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers reported in 2016 that 62% of its member attorneys had seen increased prenup requests in the prior three years, with the most common provisions being protection of separate property (78%) and spousal-maintenance terms (74%). The practical implication is that the process matters as much as the outcome: a prenup negotiated with independent counsel for each party and finalized well before the wedding is less likely to read as the distrust signal that the Mahar perception figure captures.
The main methodological caveat is that the action-side number is a perception proxy, not a direct regret question, and almost certainly overstates the relational cost actually felt once an agreement is in place. The inaction-side 15% is a constructed proxy rather than a measured regret rate — no survey asks divorced adults whether they regret not having had a prenup — so it should be read as a rough, adoption-and-attitude-derived estimate; the true inaction-regret rate across all married couples (most of whom remain married and may be disproportionately low-asset or low-conflict) could be lower still. The stakes of a prenup decision are sharpest for couples with separate pre-marital assets, business ownership, or children from prior relationships; for most first-marriage couples with similar financial starting points, the practical consequences are modest.