CDC NCHS Marriage & Divorce Vital Statistics Scraper

Fetches the US national and state-level marriage and divorce rate series published by the CDC National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Returns clean, normalized rows in the format year x geography x metric (rate per 1,000 total population).

What You Get

The actor produces a flat dataset with one row per year-geography-metric combination:

Field	Description
geography	"United States" for national series; state name for state-level data
year	4-digit year (1990-2023 depending on dataset)
metric	"marriage_rate" or "divorce_rate"
rate_per_1000	Rate per 1,000 total population
is_provisional	true for the national series (published as provisional)
source_dataset	Source filename (e.g. national-marriage-divorce-rates-00-23.xlsx)
source_url	Direct URL to the source XLSX file

Datasets covered

Dataset	Geography	Years	Records
National marriage + divorce rates	United States	2000-2023	48
State marriage rates	51 jurisdictions (all states + DC)	1990-2023	~1,275
State divorce rates	51 jurisdictions	1990-2023	~1,275

Total: ~2,598 rows per full run.

Data Source

All data originates from the CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) — the official US federal source of record for vital statistics. The XLSX files are published at cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm and are stable, periodically-updated government data files.

No authentication required. The actor fetches the landing page to discover XLSX links, downloads each file, and parses it.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	(no cap)	Maximum records to return. Useful for testing. Leave unset for the full dataset.

Example: Run with no input to get all ~2,598 rows. Set maxItems: 10 for a quick preview.

Use Cases

• Journalists and researchers needing citeable, authoritative US marriage/divorce trends
• Family-law and insurance analytics requiring historical state-level rate baselines
• SEO content on divorce statistics, marriage trends
• Demographic modeling or datasets pairing with census/population data

Notes

• National rates for recent years are marked is_provisional: true per the CDC source.
• State divorce rates exclude some states (California, Hawaii, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, and others for certain years) due to non-reporting. Gaps in the data reflect the original source.