Marriage licenses in the United States started in colonial Massachusetts around 1639, when one of the earliest known licenses was recorded. The requirement spread slowly over the next three centuries, and it wasn’t until the early 1900s that every state required a couple to obtain a license before marrying.
How Marriage Worked Before Licenses
For most of early American history, getting married didn’t involve the government at all. Marriage was a private or religious matter. A couple who lived together, presented themselves as married, and were accepted as husband and wife by their neighbors were considered legally married under common law. No ceremony, no clergy, and no paperwork were required. In small communities where reputations traveled fast, that was enough.
Churches handled whatever formal record-keeping existed. The main mechanism was the publication of banns, a practice carried over from medieval Europe. A couple’s intention to marry would be announced to the congregation, typically three times across successive weeks, so community members could raise any objection. Plymouth Colony formalized this as early as 1636, requiring banns to be read three times or, where no congregation existed, posted publicly for fifteen days. Parish registers then recorded completed marriages, and those church books remain some of the oldest documentation of American unions.
Common law marriage hasn’t disappeared entirely. Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah still allow couples to establish a valid marriage without a license, each state setting its own requirements. A few others, including Rhode Island and Oklahoma, recognize common law marriages through court decisions rather than statute. These are the exceptions. Everywhere else, a license is now mandatory, and recognition of common law marriage has been shrinking for over a century.
Why States Started Requiring Licenses
The move from informal recognition to government licensing wasn’t driven by one thing. Several motives overlapped.
Record-keeping was the most straightforward. As communities grew past the point where everyone knew everyone, governments needed reliable paperwork to sort out property, inheritance, and lines of descent. A license application created a document courts and tax collectors could rely on. It also provided a checkpoint against bigamy, since applicants had to confirm they weren’t already married, and a way to verify parental consent for minors.
There was a less tidy motive as well. Marriage licenses gave governments a mechanism to control who could marry whom, and states used that power to enforce racial hierarchies. Virginia became the first colony to ban interracial marriages in 1661, and other colonies followed. A license requirement made enforcement simple: a clerk could refuse to issue the document. By the time licenses became widespread, anti-miscegenation laws were entrenched across much of the country, and the licensing system was one of the main tools for enforcing them.
Revenue mattered too. Licensing fees were modest but reliable income for local governments. And as states began compiling vital statistics during the 19th century, marriage records became useful data for census purposes and public health tracking.
The Slow Spread from 1639 to Every State
Massachusetts recorded one of the first American marriage licenses around 1639. Several other colonial jurisdictions, including Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia, established some form of license requirement before the Revolution in 1776. Even so, adoption was slow and uneven.
By 1800, only about seven of the sixteen existing states had laws requiring licenses. A century later, roughly eighteen of forty-five states did. The real acceleration came in the early 1900s. The combination of public health campaigns, a push for standardized vital records, and the enforcement of racial restrictions created enough political momentum that every state eventually adopted some form of marriage license requirement.
The whole process took nearly 300 years from Massachusetts’s first license to universal adoption. That’s worth remembering when the system is described as an ancient tradition. In the sweep of American history, the universal marriage license is quite recent.
What Shaped the License System After It Became Universal
Once licensing was in place everywhere, three later shifts changed what the license meant and who could get one.
Premarital Blood Tests
Starting in the late 1930s, U.S. Surgeon General Thomas Parran led a national campaign against syphilis that included requiring blood tests before a license could be issued. By the end of 1938, twenty-six states had enacted laws prohibiting infected individuals from marrying. A CDC analysis found that forty states, plus the then-territories of Hawaii and Alaska, eventually adopted premarital health examination laws requiring both applicants to undergo a physical exam including a blood test for syphilis.1CDC Stacks. Premarital Health Examination Legislation – History and Analysis Some states expanded testing to include gonorrhea or rubella.
The requirements didn’t survive cost-benefit scrutiny. States began repealing them in waves starting in the 1980s. Montana held on the longest, finally eliminating its requirement in 2019 as the last state to do so. The premarital blood test era, which lasted roughly eighty years, is now fully closed.
The End of Racial Restrictions
At their peak, over 30 states had laws banning interracial marriage, and the license system was how those bans got enforced at the clerk’s counter. That ended on June 12, 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia. Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple married in Washington, D.C., had been convicted under Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute for returning to live in the state. The Court struck the law down unanimously, holding that marriage restrictions based solely on racial classifications violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.2Library of Congress. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) The decision invalidated anti-miscegenation laws in every state that still had them.
Same-Sex Marriage
The most recent major change came on June 26, 2015, when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires every state to license marriages between same-sex couples and to recognize same-sex marriages lawfully performed in other states.3Justia. Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) Before Obergefell, a same-sex couple married in one state might find their marriage unrecognized in another. The ruling made licensing uniform on this point for the first time.
From a single colonial record in 1639 to a universal requirement by the early 1900s, and then through roughly a century of further changes to what the license screens for and who can obtain one, marriage licensing has been shaped by concerns as varied as property rights, racial politics, disease prevention, and civil rights. The piece of paper itself is newer than the country.