Clark County, Nevada · Marriage License Bureau

Eight years at the altar, one county register at a time.

443,607
marriage licenses on file — every one issued in the county that calls itself the Wedding Capital of the World.

RECORDS SPAN 2018‑01‑02 → 2026‑03‑31 · 2018 & 2026 ARE PARTIAL YEARS

Applicants from out of state

76.1%

337,500 of 443,607 licenses

Busiest single day — “Twosday”

Feb 22, 2022

2,172 licenses — 14× an average day

Most popular month

October

47,308 licenses, 28% above January

Confidently same‑gender couples

7.5%

33,402 licenses — 19,057 M+M, 14,345 F+F

When

Vegas never really has an off season

Volume held remarkably steady from 2019 on, but the calendar still plays favorites: Saturdays, October, and a handful of dates people chase on purpose.

Licenses issued per year

2018 and 2026 are partial — the source data starts Jan 2, 2018 and the 2026 export ends Mar 31.

Which day of the week

Saturday alone accounts for 31% of every license on file.

Seasonality, by month

October leads — mild desert weather plus a Halloween bump; January trails every other month.

The dates people chase

Same month/day, summed across all 8 years — the folklore dates all outrank ordinary days by 15–30×.

Where

A county of 2.3 million people, marrying the rest of the country

The mailing address on file skews overwhelmingly out-of-state — Nevada itself is still the single largest state, but three in four licenses list somewhere else.

Top states of residence

By mailing address on the application — not necessarily either spouse's legal residence.

Local vs. destination

458 records (0.1%) list a non-US address — mostly UK and Canadian postal codes.

Who

Spouse 1 and spouse 2, not bride and groom

Clark County licenses have never distinguished bride from groom — every record is just two applicants. Genders below are a first-name heuristic (see methodology), not a legal determination, which is why "indeterminate" is its own slice rather than a forced guess.

Pairings, by gender heuristic

Collapses "mostly_male"/"mostly_female" into their base category; androgynous and unresolved names fall into Indeterminate.

Most common first names

Among names the heuristic classified confidently (either applicant slot).

Classified male

Classified female

Who · a closer look

Same-gender couples: a small, steadily growing share

33,402 licenses (7.5%) are confidently same-gender pairings by this heuristic — 19,057 M+M and 14,345 F+F. That share has climbed most years since 2019, and same-gender couples travel from out of state at essentially the same rate as everyone else.

Same-gender share, 2019 → 2025

7.0% → 7.9%

Risen in 5 of the last 6 years

M+M vs. F+F

19,057 : 14,345

M+M outnumbers F+F every single year, ~1.3×

Out-of-state rate

22.5% both ways

Identical to opposite-gender couples, to one decimal

Peak month

October, 8.2%

Same month that leads overall — no Pride-month (June) bump

Same-gender share of all licenses, by year

2019–2025 (full years only). A real, if gradual, upward trend.

M+M and F+F, by year

Both track the same rise; M+M has led F+F every year on file.

Same-gender share, by month

Tracks the overall seasonality curve (October leads) rather than diverging around June/Pride Month, which lands almost exactly at the yearly average.

A check worth running before trusting any of this: the top "female" first name among F+F pairs by this heuristic came back as Kyle, and the top "male" name among M+M pairs came back as Alexis — because gender-guesser's reference corpus reads both backwards from current US usage. That's the reason a second, independently-sourced score exists (below) rather than taking this one on faith.

Methodology

Two scores, compared

Everything above uses gender-guesser. A second heuristic sourced from real SSA birth-record statistics (top 1000 US names/year, 1880–2008) tells a similar story but not an identical one — which is exactly why both are kept rather than picking a winner.

Same-gender share, this heuristic vs. SSA

7.5% vs. 5.6%

Both rise 2019→2025; they disagree on the size of the effect

M+M vs. F+F — which leads?

Flips by method

gender-guesser: M+M leads. SSA: F+F leads, 12,961 vs. 11,796.

Agreement rate

96.6%

Of 356,565 spouse-slots both scores classify confidently

Same-gender share by year, both methods

Different absolute levels, same rising direction — the trend is the load-bearing finding, not the exact percentage.

Fun facts

Names among same-gender couples

Using the SSA score's strict "male"/"female" classifications only (no "mostly_*" collapsing) — the cleaner of the two scores for naming actual names, since it doesn't share gender-guesser's Kyle/Alexis problem.

Most common first names

Among 8,911 strict M+M and 9,098 strict F+F pairs.

M+M couples

F+F couples

Most common exact name pairings

The specific first-name combination, unordered — James & James really is the top-tied M+M pairing.

M+M couples

F+F couples

Same-name couples

Not a fluke — 108 M+M and 85 F+F couples on file share the exact same first name.

M+M · 108 couples

F+F · 85 couples

Couples who already shared a last name

Rarer, and actually less common among same-gender couples than opposite-gender ones — M+M 0.81%, F+F 1.18%, vs. 1.77% for opposite-gender couples. Likely just surname-frequency coincidence (Smith, Williams) rather than a meaningful difference. One highlight: an F+F couple on file shares the last name Corleone.

M+M · 72 couples (0.81%)

F+F · 107 couples (1.18%)