SEOUL, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- South Korea's newlywed couples kept falling last year on the continued trend of delayed marriages, statistical office data showed Monday.

The number of couples who had been legally married within the five years until Nov. 1, 2022 was 1,032,253, down 6.3 percent from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea.

The figure continued to decline for the past years from 1.47 million in 2015 to 1.38 million in 2017, 1.26 million in 2019 and 1.10 million in 2021.

More young people delayed or gave up on marriages on the back of economic difficulties such as surging housing prices and stubborn youth unemployment.

The number of couples who tied the knot for the first time during the five-year period was 815,357, or 79.0 percent of the total, last year, while the reading for second marriages was 213,803, or 20.7 percent.

Among the couples who got married for the first time, 46.4 percent had no baby in 2022. It was up 0.6 percentage points from the previous year.

The average number of babies born to the newlyweds slipped to 0.65 in 2022 from 0.66 in the previous year.

Among the newlywed pairs, 50.2 percent of dual-income couples had no baby, higher than 40.6 percent for single-income couples without a baby.

As for homeownership, 59.6 percent of newly married couples with their own homes had babies, higher than 49.5 percent for the newlyweds without homes who had babies. Enditem

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