You asked
Please may you provide me with the number of wedding registrations that were made in England and Wales in December 2020. Please also give me December 2019's wedding registrations for comparison.
We said
Thank you for your enquiry
Our marriage statistics are published two years in arrears. Marriages for 2018 will be published July/August 2021.
This is due to the delay in receiving data on religious marriages from churches. Details of civil marriage registrations come to us quite quickly as it's an electronic system. However, the recording of religious marriages is still paper-based and therefore takes a long time before reaching ONS. Delays can also be due to closure of churches and changes in the clergy. We wait 2 years to receive as many religious marriage registration records as possible in order to balance timeliness against completeness of the data.
Therefore, we do not currently hold all marriage data for 2019 and 2020.