Amish Marriage and Children: Wedding Age, Family Size and Birth Customs

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Amish couples usually marry in their early twenties, the bride at about 21 or 22 and the groom a year or two older. Their first child usually arrives a year to a year and a half after the wedding. Families average five or more children, says the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College.

Most of these figures come from the family directories that many large Amish communities compile, listing each household with its wedding date and every child’s date of birth. Demographers have studied them settlement by settlement, and the patterns change slowly.

An Amish wedding comes after baptism. Young people decide for themselves whether to be baptized and join the church, and most take their vows between 18 and 22. From about 16, young people go through Rumspringa, Pennsylvania German for “running around”, when they meet their friends on weekends at singings, volleyball games and suppers. For most, Rumspringa ends with marriage.

Studies of the largest settlements put brides at about 21 or 22 and grooms at about 22 to 24:

Settlement and directory	Brides	Grooms
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, 2015 (weddings of 2010–2014, average)	22.1	23.9
Holmes County, Ohio, 2025 (average)	22.1	23.5
Elkhart-LaGrange, Indiana, 2017	21.2	22.7
Geauga County, Ohio, 2014 (median, parents born 1978–1987)	20.9	22.3
All North American Amish (Kraybill and colleagues, 2013, average)	21.1	22.3

The husband is usually the older partner. In the Lancaster County sample he was older in about nine marriages out of ten, by an average of about two years. Over more than a century the ages have changed by less than two years: Lancaster brides averaged 20.4 in the 1890s and 22.1 in 2010–2014, and grooms 23.4 and 23.9. Joseph Donnermeyer of Ohio State University, who analyzed the 2015 Lancaster directory, leaves open whether the recent small rise for brides will last.

A typical Amish mother has her first baby at about 22 to 23.5 years old. In Holmes County, Ohio, the 2025 directory gives an average of 23.5 years for first-time mothers and 24.9 for first-time fathers, with the first child born about 16 months after the wedding. In the Geauga settlement, also in Ohio, women born between 1938 and 1987 had their first child at a median age of about 22, a median of one year after marrying, and the interval was the same in the 1993 and 2014 directories. In the 2015 Lancaster County directory, the first birth came on average slightly over 512 days, about 17 months, after the wedding.

Directories list children by date of birth, so the studies built on them report a mother’s age at her first birth. None of these studies gives an age at first pregnancy; subtracting nine months from the age at first birth gives about 21 to 23, for the pregnancy that led to that first birth.

The Young Center’s 2026 population profile counts “five or more children on average” in Amish families. Its page on population growth puts the average at about five and adds that “it’s not unusual for them to have ten or more.” Women who have finished having children have had more: between about six and eight on average in the settlements studied, against about 1.7 children per woman in the United States as a whole in 2019.

Group and source	Women counted	Average births
Lancaster County, 2015 directory	Aged 50 and over	7.6
Geauga County, 2014 directory	Aged 45 and over	6.9
Holmes County New Order, 2020 directory (Troyer 2022)	Born before 1974	5.8
Holmes County Old Order, 2020 directory (Troyer 2022)	Born before 1974	6.1
Holmes County Dan (Andy Weaver) church, 2020 directory (Troyer 2022)	Born before 1974	7.8
Holmes County Swartzentruber, family genealogies (Troyer 2022)	Born before 1956	10.4

Averages that include young couples come out lower. Across all married couples in the Lancaster sample, the average was 5.8 children, against 7.6 for women over 50. Of those older women, about three in four had six or more children, about one in four had ten or more, and fewer than three in a hundred had none.

Family size follows the church group and, to a lesser degree, the father’s work. In Henry Troyer’s study of Holmes County, the more conservative the group, the larger the family, from 5.8 children among New Order women to 10.4 among the Swartzentruber, the most conservative. In the Elkhart-LaGrange settlement of Indiana, Thomas Meyers of Goshen College found families slowly shrinking, from seven children as the norm to slightly more than six, except among farmers. As Meyers puts it, “The smallest families are those with fathers who leave for the factory each morning.”

These families, together with the 85 percent or more of young people who join the church, drive the growth of the Amish population. The Young Center estimated 421,200 Amish in North America in June 2026, a number that doubles about every 20 years.

Another baptized member of the church. The Amish affirm the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, and its article on marriage speaks of “an honorable state of matrimony, of two free, believing persons.” Paul wrote that a widow “is at liberty to be married to whom she will; only in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 7:39), and the confession reads “in the Lord” to mean marrying only those “who have previously become united with the church as one heart and soul, have received one baptism, and stand in one communion, faith, doctrine and practice.” Among the Old Order Amish, the sociologist J. Howard Kauffman wrote, marriage to someone who has not joined the church is not permitted. Outsiders may join, and several dozen have, by learning the dialect and accepting the church’s rules.

Close relatives may not marry. “The Amish do not permit first cousins to marry but sometimes second or third cousins marry,” the Young Center explains. Because their gene pool is restricted, some inherited diseases appear more often in some Amish communities, and clinics such as the Clinic for Special Children in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, diagnose and treat affected children.

Traditionally after the harvest, and in the middle of the week. In Lancaster County about three Amish weddings in four from 2010 to 2014 took place in November, and in every period studied Tuesday and Thursday together account for more than nine weddings in ten. The scholar John A. Hostetler explained that November and December are “a time when the work year allows community-wide participation.” In Holmes County, where only about one Amish household head in nine now farms, weddings have moved to late spring and autumn; May and September were the most popular months in the 2025 directory, and Thursday is still the favorite day.

The wedding is a church occasion that fills the whole day. A bishop officiates, the vows follow a long morning worship service, and the rest of the day goes to a meal, visiting and games among the young people, often with hundreds of guests. Afterwards, relatives and neighbors may gather to paint the newlyweds’ house.

Yes, and it joins one husband and one wife. The Dordrecht Confession roots marriage in the order God “instituted it Himself with Adam and Eve,” and the Amish church does not allow divorce. Old Order rules forbid a member to initiate a divorce, in keeping with Jesus’ words: “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). A widow or widower may marry again.

At home, in a birth center or in a hospital, depending on the community, the family and the pregnancy. Health care practices “vary considerably across Amish communities and from family to family,” the Young Center notes. The Amish “do not cite biblical injunctions against modern health care or the latest medicines,” and many use doctors and hospitals. For birth, many prefer to stay out of the hospital, for reasons a team of Ohio researchers summed up as “reduced cost, increased comfort and privacy and a chance for a ‘more natural birth.’”

One community has been counted closely. Of 1,178 Amish babies born in Vernon and Monroe counties in southwestern Wisconsin from 2005 to 2009, 58 percent were born at home, 34 percent at the La Farge birthing center and 8 percent in hospitals. Women there “generally give birth at home attended by an unlicensed birth attendant, mother, mother-in-law, or neighbor,” wrote the practitioners who founded and run the center. The local clinic opened the center at the community’s request, as a safer alternative to birth at home. Following the community’s custom, its staff gave no pain-relief drugs in labor, and 4 percent of its 927 births from 1993 to 2010 were by cesarean section.

Cost shapes these choices. The Amish generally decline commercial insurance, and for large hospital bills many communities take a special offering, collected by the deacon from each family in the church district. A small 1993 study of 15 Amish women and 76 pregnancies in Geauga County, Ohio, found that, when they had no symptoms they saw as serious, the women started prenatal care earlier in a first pregnancy and later with each child after; the researchers pointed to “barriers of transportation, cost, and child care needs.”

The Young Center finds “no explicit religious prohibitions against certain types of medicine” among the Amish, and choices about birth vary from family to family. Each church district keeps its own Ordnung, a set of rules that is usually unwritten, differs from district to district and covers matters such as clothing, technology and leisure. These rules mostly reach childbirth indirectly. Old Order members do not own cars, so reaching a hospital or birth center can mean calling a hired driver, and in southwestern Wisconsin the birth center’s practitioners noted that living without telephones or cars could delay care for complications.

Day to day, Amish women are expected to wear a head covering and, usually, a three-piece dress with a cape and an apron; how dress can show whether an Amish woman is married is a question of its own. Wives typically devote themselves to housekeeping and motherhood, and women with young children almost never hold full-time jobs outside the home.

The teaching leaves the number of children to God; the practice varies. Lawrence Greksa of Case Western Reserve University describes the Amish as having “long-standing religious-based proscriptions against birth control.” Donald Kraybill and his colleagues trace large families to “an oft-cited religious directive in Amish writings and oral lore” to “be fruitful and multiply,” the blessing God spoke over the first man and woman: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Thomas Meyers puts the teaching plainly: “The Amish continue to teach the principle that the number of children in a family is in God’s hands.”

Practice is less uniform. In a survey published in 2007, 21 percent of 249 married Amish women aged 18 to 45 in Lancaster County said they were using a method of birth control, half of them condoms, as Troyer reports. Meyers notes that “some form of family planning is being used by Amish women” but that “there has been no systematic attempt to explore that topic.” In the Geauga settlement, the total fertility rate fell from 8.6 children for women born from 1924 to 1933 to about 7 for women born in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, a decline that Greksa says “is consistent with the use of birth control measures.” He found no sign that couples stop once they reach a chosen number of children, and so concluded that the settlement still fits what demographers call natural fertility. Troyer, comparing the church groups of Holmes County, concluded that “the Amish do not practice natural fertility universally.” The two scholars define the term differently: for Greksa, natural fertility means couples do not stop at a chosen family size, even if they have fewer children overall; for Troyer, it means no conscious effort at all to limit the number of children.

Each church district sets its own rules, and the Young Center warns that the diversity among Amish groups and districts “makes it risky to generalize about ‘the’ Amish.”

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• Do the Amish Get Marriage Licenses? Yes, the Same as Other Couples
• Can the Amish Get Divorced? No, Their Church Forbids It
• How to Identify if an Amish or Mennonite Woman is Married
• Can the Amish Become Doctors? No, but They Use Doctors and Hospitals
• Amish Religious Practices: How Do The Amish Worship?
• Amish vs Mennonite: Same Anabaptist Roots, Different Ways of Living

More from this seriesWho Are The Amish?See all 35 articles