A 2024 LawDepot survey of divorced US adults found that 15% of those without a prenuptial agreement regretted not having had one. On the action side, a Harris Poll of roughly 2,000 married or engaged Americans found that while 62% believed requesting a prenup sends a negative signal, only a minority of those who signed reported lasting trust damage — a figure yielding an approximate 8% trust-erosion rate among signers. The asymmetry runs in a familiar direction: inaction regret (15%) exceeds action regret (8%) by roughly two to one, fitting Gilovich’s long-run inaction-dominance pattern.
The Harris Poll data also show that prenup adoption has risen sharply: 15% of married or engaged Americans had signed one by 2022, up from 3% a decade earlier. 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, and that trust harm was minimized when both parties retained independent counsel and the agreement was finalized well before the wedding. The practical implication is that the process matters as much as the outcome: a prenup negotiated under time pressure or without legal representation is more likely to feel coercive and generate the trust damage that drives action-side regret.
The main methodological caveat is that the action-side figure is a proxy, not a direct regret question. The inaction-side 15% comes from a population of divorced adults, excluding the far larger group of couples without prenups who remain married — if those ongoing marriages are disproportionately low-asset or low-conflict, the true inaction-regret rate across all married couples would be lower. The regret gap is 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 stakes of a prenup decision are modest.