How many divorce cases are filed in Poland and how do they end? Court data for 2004–2025

Where these numbers come from

The Ministry of Justice keeps records of civil divorce and separation cases in regional courts: how many cases arrive, how many the courts resolve and in what way, and how many carry over to the next period. Leksio pulls this data straight from the government open-data service and turns it into the charts and takeaways below - no retouching, no cherry-picking.

Divorce and separation cases are heard at first instance by a regional court. The records count cases, not people: one entry is one petition, regardless of how many people its effects touch.

Where the data comes from and how Leksio computes it

The source is the dataset “Records of civil divorce and separation cases in common courts” published by the Ministry of Justice at dane.gov.pl - the resource covering first-instance proceedings in regional courts in 2004–2025. Leksio fetches the resource through the API, normalises it and computes every value on this page from it. “Divorce granted” corresponds to the reporting category “accepted in full or in part”, and the backlog to “remaining for the next period”.

Resolution types do not add up to all resolved cases, because some end in other ways; in the oldest years discontinued cases were not reported separately. Any takeaway missing its data is simply not shown. The report describes statistics, not an individual situation - it is not legal advice.

The wave of petitions recedes, rulings hold steady

The number of new divorce petitions is clearly lower than at the peak of the period, but it has moved in both directions from year to year. The deepest annual fall in cases ending with a divorce occurred in 2020; the records alone cannot establish its cause.

What happens to a petition

Most resolved cases end with a divorce granted - the court accepts the claim in full or in part. Dismissal on the merits is only one outcome and accounts for a very small share of all resolutions. That does not mean almost every petition produces a divorce: some cases are discontinued, returned, rejected or end in another way not itemised in the table.

The collapse of legal separation

Legal separation was meant to be a gentler alternative to divorce: the marriage formally continues, but the court declares the breakdown of the relationship. The records show the institution has nearly fallen out of use - at the start of the period separation cases numbered in the tens of thousands a year, today they are a statistical margin.

The queue outside the courtroom

The records also count cases still pending at the end of the reporting period. After falling early in the series, their number rose and approached its 2004 level; the 2025 value is not a record for the full series. This is a year-end stock, not a queue length: it does not say how long an individual case has waited or when a hearing will be set.

Court data versus divorce demography

Statistics Poland treats divorce as a demographic event: it counts final divorce judgments by the residence of the person filing the petition and supports population-based rates. This report instead describes court workload - incoming cases, disposals and the stock pending at year-end. The sources concern the same phenomenon but answer different questions; their values must not be added or treated as one series.

A peer-reviewed study of demographic change in Poland in 2003–2023 also shows spatial differences between urban, suburban and rural areas. It supports a future extension using Statistics Poland rates and a map, but does not establish the causes of annual changes in court case counts.

Datasets - dane.gov.pl

• dane.gov.pl - dataset 28095

  Primary open-data source from which the figures and charts in this report are computed. Individual files, reporting years, transformations and missing measurements are documented in the expanded methodology.