What Is a Prenup? What It Covers, What It Costs, and When It Holds Up
The Million Dollar Question: According to a Harris Poll survey conducted for The New Yorker, what share of Americans who have been married or are engaged say they’ve actually signed a prenup — up from just 3% in 2010?
A) 8% B) 15% C) 24% D) 38%Read on for the answer.
A prenup used to be shorthand for a single, slightly embarrassing idea: a rich person’s insurance policy against a gold digger. That framing is out of date. A prenuptial agreement is a contract, governed by ordinary contract law plus a handful of marriage-specific rules, and most of what determines whether it works has nothing to do with how much money is involved. It has to do with paperwork — who disclosed what, who had their own lawyer, and how close to the wedding the signature went on the page.
What it is
A prenuptial agreement — “prenup” — is a written contract two people sign before they marry, laying out how property, debt, and spousal support will be divided if the marriage ends in divorce or death. Its close cousin, the postnuptial agreement (“postnup”), does the same job but is signed after the wedding — often because a couple skipped the conversation the first time, or because a major life event (an inheritance, a business sale, infidelity that both partners want to work through) made them want new terms mid-marriage.
Most U.S. states base their prenup law on the Uniform Premarital Agreement Act (UPAA), drafted in 1983, or its 2012 successor, the Uniform Premarital and Marital Agreements Act (UPMAA), though a number of states — including New York and California — still run on their own statutes and case law rather than either uniform act. The common thread across all of them: a prenup can reach property division, spousal support (alimony), and the disposition of a business or estate. It cannot reach child custody or child support — every U.S. state treats those as the court’s call at the time of divorce, made in the child’s interest, regardless of what the parents signed years earlier. A clause purporting to set child support in advance is simply unenforceable, prenup or not.
Who uses it
The honest answer, backed by survey data, is: a fast-growing share of everyone, not just the obviously wealthy. A Harris Poll survey fielded for The New Yorker in May 2022 found that 15% of Americans who have been married or are engaged say they’ve signed a prenup — up from just 3% in 2010. A follow-up Harris Poll survey for Axios in September 2023 put the figure at roughly 1 in 5 married couples overall, with sharp generational skew: 41% of engaged-or-married Gen Z respondents said they’d entered a prenup, and 47% of engaged-or-married millennials had. Half of U.S. adults in that survey said they at least somewhat support the idea.
That rise shows up on the legal-industry side too. In a 2018 CNBC report, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (AAML) said 62% of its member attorneys had seen an increase in the total number of clients seeking prenups over the prior three years, and just over half had specifically seen more requests from millennials — only 2% saw a decrease among 18-to-34-year-olds. Arlene Dubin, chair of the matrimonial practice at Moses & Singer, told CNBC the agreements had seen “a fivefold increase… over the past 20 years.” An earlier 2010 AAML survey, reported by the ABA Journal, found 73% of divorce lawyers had seen rising prenup demand over the prior five years — notably “especially among middle-class couples,” not just the obviously rich.
What differs sharply by wealth level isn’t whether people sign a prenup, but what’s inside it. A $1M–$10M couple’s prenup is usually a straightforward property schedule: this house, this retirement account, this small business stays separate. At $100M-plus, the document looks nothing like that. The Wall Street Journal reported in June 2025 that ultra-high-net-worth prenups now routinely address startup equity that can’t be traded on public markets, carried interest in private-equity funds, royalty streams, and family-trust distribution rules — plus nonfinancial terms like who gets access to the private jet or how a couple’s horses are cared for after a split.
Why they use it
Beyond the obvious “protect what I already have” motive, three reasons recur in the reporting. First, clarity: a prenup moves the hardest financial conversation of a divorce — who keeps what — to a calmer moment, which in theory reduces future litigation. Second, protecting something that isn’t really “theirs” to split: a family business, an inheritance, or equity vested before the marriage. Third, a generational pattern the ABA Journal’s reporting names directly — California attorney Myra Fleischer described clients who watched their own parents go through a messy divorce and “want to pre-plan” rather than repeat it.
Requests increasingly come from both partners, not just the wealthier one walking into a divorce lawyer’s office alone. Attorneys describe prenups as standard pre-wedding paperwork for business owners with partners or co-founders (a divorce that forces a business sale or buyout can hurt people who were never married to either spouse), and for anyone remarrying who wants an existing estate plan — trusts and inheritances meant for children from a first marriage — to stay intact regardless of what happens in the second one.
Second marriages are, unsurprisingly, where prenups cluster hardest. Someone who went through one divorce tends to know exactly what a messy property fight costs — in money, time, and the parts of a settlement nobody plans for — and is far less willing to repeat the experience unprotected. That lines up with the Fleischer pattern described above: it isn’t only people who’ve personally divorced who want the paperwork, but also their adult children, who watched the first one happen.
How it works
A prenup only becomes a binding contract if it clears a specific procedural bar, and that bar is where almost all the real action is. Under the UPAA/UPMAA framework most states use, and under state-specific case law in the states that don’t follow either uniform act, an enforceable prenup generally needs to be: in writing and signed by both parties; entered into voluntarily, with neither party under duress or undue pressure; preceded by a fair and complete disclosure of each person’s assets, debts, and income (or a documented, voluntary waiver of that disclosure); and, in most states, negotiated with each party represented by their own independent lawyer — one attorney drafting for “both sides” is a recognized ground for later challenge.
Timing matters more than people expect. Signing a prenup the night before, or even the week before, a wedding is one of the most common fact patterns courts point to when finding duress or an inability to meaningfully review the terms. Family-law attorneys generally recommend finalizing a prenup weeks to months before the wedding date, not days.
State property law is the other variable that changes what a prenup actually needs to do. Nine states — Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin — are community-property states, where, absent an agreement, most assets and debts acquired during the marriage are split 50/50 regardless of whose name is on them. In the remaining “equitable distribution” states, a court instead divides marital property by what it considers fair, weighing factors like each spouse’s income, contributions, and the length of the marriage, which gives a judge far more discretion than a 50/50 default. A prenup’s main legal job, in either system, is to override that default — specifying which assets stay separate property and how support will be handled — rather than invent some entirely new framework.
What it costs
The number most people have in their head — “tens of thousands of dollars” — is high for a standard case. LegalZoom’s cost breakdown, updated in July 2024, puts a baseline around $890 to draft a simple prenup and $510 for a second attorney to review it, with a realistic total range of roughly $1,000 to $10,000 for a standard case where each partner retains their own lawyer — the separate-counsel requirement means it is rarely a true single-lawyer DIY if the goal is an agreement that holds up.
That range looks genuinely cheap next to the alternative. The same LegalZoom analysis cites a 2019 Martindale-Nolo survey putting the average cost of a divorce at $11,300, and a more recent Forbes Advisor estimate of $7,567; other industry estimates for a contested divorce with real disputes over property run from $7,000 to north of $23,000. A prenup that costs a few thousand dollars to negotiate properly is, in that light, closer to a cheap insurance policy than a luxury expense.
Complex and ultra-high-net-worth cases are a different cost tier entirely, scaling with the complexity of what’s being protected rather than the couple’s income. Business valuations, multiple trusts, and — per the Wall Street Journal’s 2025 reporting — cases that require consulting lawyers “in eight different jurisdictions” (as New York attorney Robert Cohen described one matter) push total legal costs for a single prenup well into five and six figures. Whether a Jeff Bezos–level prenup exists at all is, notably, not public: both the Journal and Fortune reported ahead of Bezos’s 2025 wedding to Lauren Sánchez that attorneys who don’t represent the couple expect one, built around nondisclosure and non-disparagement terms, trust provisions, and the kind of multi-jurisdiction complexity that comes with a fortune Forbes put at $378 billion as of its September 2026 ranking of the richest Americans — but neither outlet could confirm one actually exists.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs
The dollar cost is the easy part to quote; the harder costs are procedural and emotional. The independent-counsel requirement means a prenup is structurally a two-lawyer negotiation, which is part of why it costs more than a simple will — there is no shortcut where one side’s lawyer “helps” the other side too, at least not if the agreement needs to survive a later challenge. The disclosure requirement means both partners have to put a real, itemized asset and debt list in writing before the wedding, a step that surfaces financial information (or financial disagreements) some couples would otherwise have put off for years.
There’s a renewal problem, too. A prenup written around a couple’s finances at age 28 can become badly out of date by 45, after a business is sold, a windfall arrives, or children change what “fair” looks like — which is exactly the gap a postnuptial agreement exists to close. And confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, common in high-profile prenups per the Journal’s reporting, can themselves become a second source of litigation if one side later claims the other violated them.
There’s also a coordination cost that only shows up later: a prenup has to be kept consistent with the rest of an estate plan, not written in isolation from it. A will, a revocable trust, and beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance can all contradict what a prenup says about who gets what — and when they do, courts and administrators have to work out which document controls, which is exactly the kind of expensive, avoidable dispute the prenup was supposed to prevent in the first place. Attorneys who draft prenups for clients with any real estate-planning complexity generally loop in the client’s estate lawyer at the same time, rather than treating the two documents as separate projects.
What people get wrong
That it’s rare or unromantic. The data says otherwise: 15% of ever-married/engaged Americans overall, and closer to half of engaged millennials and Gen Z, per the Harris Poll figures above. It has moved from taboo to a fairly ordinary pre-wedding task for a meaningful share of each younger generation.
That it’s bulletproof once signed. Courts reopen prenups regularly, and almost always for the same handful of reasons. In Iuliano v. Iuliano, a 2006 New York appellate case, a trial court had voided part of a couple’s prenup on the theory that the husband hadn’t fully disclosed his assets — the appellate panel reversed that specific finding on the facts of the case, but left open the couple’s separate claims of duress and inadequate opportunity to review the agreement with counsel, sending those back for trial. The case is a clean example of how disclosure and duress, not the agreement’s substance, are what actually get litigated. A more dramatic example: reporting on a since-settled New York case described a prenup overturned on a fraud theory — the wife successfully argued she’d been induced to sign by a false representation her husband made beforehand, a less common but real route to invalidating an agreement beyond the usual disclosure and duress claims.
That it covers everything. It does not cover child custody or child support in any state — those are decided at the time of divorce, in the child’s interest, no matter what the prenup says.
That only the wealthy sign them. The 2010 AAML survey cited above specifically flagged rising demand “among middle-class couples,” and the generational Harris Poll data shows the fastest growth isn’t concentrated at the top of the wealth ladder at all — it’s concentrated by age.
Bottom line
The answer to the Million Dollar Question is B) 15% — the share of Americans who’ve been married or engaged who say they’ve actually signed a prenup, per the 2022 Harris Poll, up from just 3% in 2010. A prenup is cheaper than most people assume for a standard case (often $1,000 to $10,000, against an average divorce cost north of $7,000), it is not reserved for the obviously wealthy, and it holds up reliably when the three procedural boxes — full disclosure, independent counsel on each side, and no last-minute signature — are actually checked. What changes with wealth isn’t whether the document works; it’s how much there is to describe inside it, and how many jurisdictions’ lawyers it takes to describe it.
Related reading:
– Marriage and Prenups: Romance, Power, and Protection
– Divorce: What Happens When Wealth Splits
– Trusts: How Wealth Is Held, Protected, and Passed On
– Asset Protection: How the Wealthy Reduce Exposure to Risk
– Inheritance: The Transfer of Wealth Between Generations
