Marriage and Prenups: Romance, Power, and Protection
The Million Dollar Question: Among US high-net-worth individuals — households at $1M+ investable assets — what share enter into a prenuptial agreement before marriage, compared with roughly 15–20% in the general married US population?
A) ~25% B) ~50% C) ~80% D) Effectively 100%Read on for the answer.
A prenup at wealth is not the romance-killer the news cycle suggests. It is the artifact produced when two people decide to take their joint financial life seriously enough to put it on paper. This piece walks through how the agreement actually works at the $1M, $10M, $100M, and $1B levels — and why the two things most readers underweight (the trust restructuring before the wedding, and the disclosure schedules attached to the contract) usually do more of the protection than the prenup itself.
What it is
A modern high-net-worth marriage plan rests on three load-bearing components, not one.
The contract is the part readers picture: a prenuptial agreement signed before the wedding, and often a postnuptial agreement signed at some point during the marriage. The document defines what counts as separate property, what counts as marital property, how a business interest is treated, how the appreciation of pre-marital assets is handled, and (subject to state law) what happens with spousal support. It is a contract about death and divorce, not a contract about the marriage itself. It does not bind courts on child custody, child support, or remedies for domestic violence.
The trust layer does more of the work in practice and gets less attention. At $5M+ households, the wealth that matters is increasingly held inside irrevocable trusts — dynasty trusts, Spousal Lifetime Access Trusts (SLATs), pre-marital family trusts — that were funded before the wedding. Assets held inside a properly structured irrevocable trust are generally not “marital property” at all, because the grantor surrendered ownership when the trust was funded. Per the Glennon Law Firm’s overview of trusts in prenuptial planning, revocable trusts that the grantor can change at will tend to look like marital property; irrevocable trusts that the grantor truly cannot reach are the ones that hold up.
The disclosure layer is the part attorneys flag as the most-attacked at divorce. A prenup is supposed to be signed against a full schedule of each spouse’s assets, liabilities, income, and contingent interests — real estate, business equity, brokerage and retirement accounts, debts, expected inheritances. If disclosure was materially incomplete or stale when the document was signed, courts can set the agreement aside in whole or in part. The schedule is also the moment the couple actually sees each other’s full financial picture, which is often the most-thorough financial conversation they ever have.
The prenup, the trust, and the disclosure together do the job none of them does alone.
Who uses it
At $1M–$5M, the prenup is the norm but not universal. Adoption sits around 70–80% in this band, well above the 15–20% rate the LawDepot prenup survey reports for the broader married population and consistent with HelloPrenup’s 2024 statistics on high-net-worth adoption. Trust restructuring at this band is rare unless there is a family business, an inherited interest, or an existing SLAT in the picture. The typical couple is mid-band entrepreneurs, established professionals, second marriages with children from a prior relationship, or households where one partner expects a meaningful inheritance.
At $5M–$30M, the prenup becomes structural rather than stylistic. Adoption is effectively expected. Trust restructuring is common when a business interest or significant inheritance is involved. The disclosure schedules become elaborate — multiple LLCs, partnership interests, restricted stock, options, retirement accounts, real estate held through entities. Postnups start appearing in this band, usually triggered by a liquidity event mid-marriage: a business sale, an IPO, an unexpected inheritance, an executive comp event that changes the picture materially.
At $30M–$100M, adoption is effectively universal. The single-family office (see #23 Family Office) typically coordinates the disclosure work in cooperation with outside family-law counsel. The wealth itself usually sits in trust structures — GRATs, SLATs, dynasty trusts often domiciled in South Dakota, Delaware, Nevada, or Alaska, the perpetuities-favorable jurisdictions — so the prenup’s substantive work happens at the margin: defining what is not in trust and what counts as marital property within the wedded household.
At $100M+, the same architecture, with multiplication. Multiple jurisdictions are typical: one or both spouses domiciled abroad, assets in offshore structures, citizenship-by-investment planning layered in. Multi-counsel teams — one firm for each spouse, separate trust counsel, separate corporate counsel for any closely-held business interest. Postnups are routine, not exceptional. At $1B+, the contract itself is the smallest line item; the trust architecture, foundation governance, and corporate-vehicle papering do the load-bearing work.
Three well-reported examples illustrate the spread. The Bezos / Sánchez “multi-million dollar” prenup, per Fortune’s June 2025 reporting, signed before the Venice wedding. The Brady / Bündchen “ironclad prenup” reported by BuzzFeed News, which allowed the divorce to be finalized in roughly a day. And the counter-example — Bill and Melinda Gates married in 1994 with no prenup, which is part of why their settlement reportedly took roughly two years to negotiate after the 2021 filing.
Why they use it
The shorthand explanation is “to protect the money,” and it isn’t wrong, but it understates what the document does.
The first function is solving the disparity problem. When one partner brings significantly more wealth into the marriage, both partners benefit from defining what is separate and what is marital. Without a written agreement, state-by-state equitable-distribution and community-property rules can produce divorce outcomes neither side would have chosen if asked in advance.
The second function is preserving family-business equity. If one partner has a stake in a closely-held family business, division at divorce can force a sale, force a buyout, or force the inconvenient outcome of co-ownership with an ex-spouse and in-laws. A prenup that explicitly carves out the business interest, combined with trust restructuring before the wedding, prevents that.
The third function is governing dynasty wealth. At $30M+, much of the wealth is not the spouse-to-be’s at all — it sits in family trusts. The prenup defines what happens if the trust later distributes principal during the marriage, and what happens to assets that were marital but were re-titled into trust during the marriage. Without that bridge, the spouses’ separate-property positions drift in opaque ways over decades.
The fourth function is the second-marriage planning case. A prenup is a contract with the current spouse, but the constituency it usually serves is the children from a prior marriage. The most common motive in second-marriage HNW planning is preserving inheritance for the existing children — the structure is “your money is yours, my money is mine, the kids inherit what I brought to the marriage.”
The fifth function is protection from later fraud allegations. A correctly disclosed prenup is also a defense for both spouses against later claims of hidden assets or undisclosed income. Each knows what the other had going in, and each is protected if the other later denies awareness.
The sixth, increasingly important, is cross-border. Marriages involving a non-US-domiciled spouse, a prior foreign marriage, or planned future residency abroad introduce conflict-of-laws questions that only a prenup with a clean choice-of-law clause resolves cleanly.
How it works
Walk through the three layers one at a time.
The contract typically negotiates over 3–6 months for a $5M–$30M household and 6–12 months for $30M+. Rushed prenups signed days before the wedding are the most-attacked at divorce, usually on duress and inadequate-time-to-review grounds. Independent counsel for each side is standard everywhere and mandatory under the Uniform Premarital and Marital Agreements Act (UPMAA), the model statute the Uniform Law Commission promulgated in 2012; the UPAA and UPMAA together have been adopted by roughly 28–29 states, per Cornell’s Legal Information Institute summary. Standard provisions cover separate-property definition, treatment of appreciation on separate property, treatment of marital labor that grows separate-property assets (“active appreciation”), business-interest treatment, sunset and inflation clauses, choice of law, choice of venue, and dispute-resolution mechanics. Postnups follow the same architecture, signed during the marriage. Common triggers are a business sale, an inheritance, an IPO, or material relationship changes. Some states impose a two-year unenforceability presumption — Minnesota’s August 2024 reforms are the cleanest recent example, per the Glennon Law Firm’s coverage — if either spouse files for divorce within two years of signing, which closes off the use of the document as a tactical pre-divorce maneuver.
The trust layer is the part that does most of the protection at the higher wealth bands and the part most readers underweight. The simplest and most-effective single move is funding an irrevocable trust before the wedding: the grantor genuinely surrenders ownership of those assets, and the assets are not “marital property” because they are not the grantor’s property at all. Dynasty trusts and SLATs are the two structures that come up most. A dynasty trust is multi-generational, typically domiciled in a perpetuities-favorable state, and holds wealth institutionally rather than personally. A SLAT is a more nuanced tool — one spouse funds an irrevocable trust naming the other spouse as a beneficiary, which preserves household access to the assets while removing them from the grantor’s estate. The catch with SLATs is that at divorce, the non-grantor spouse’s beneficiary interest can become contested, so the prenup has to reference and accommodate the SLAT’s terms explicitly. Across the board, the prenup and the trust documents have to talk to each other; an agreement that says “Spouse A’s separate property includes X” without addressing what happens if X is later contributed to a trust during the marriage is the kind of drafting failure that surfaces at divorce.
The disclosure layer is where the most actual lawyer-hours go in HNW prenups. Each side attaches a schedule of assets, liabilities, income, contingent interests, and prior tax returns to the agreement at signing. Closely-held business interests, options, partnership stakes, and pre-IPO equity need clean valuations to attach to the schedule — and getting those is most of the cost. The disclosure is also the safety mechanism: a prenup signed against a complete, contemporaneous schedule is materially harder to set aside than one signed against a vague paragraph saying “Spouse A’s assets are substantial.”
What it costs
At $1M–$5M, each side typically spends $3K–$15K on a straightforward prenup, more if there is a business interest or a real-estate portfolio in the picture. HelloPrenup’s survey of family-law attorneys puts the average prenup at around $8K per couple, which sits at the lower end of HNW. Postnup costs at this band track the prenup roughly one-for-one.
At $5M–$30M, each side runs $15K–$50K. Add valuation work on business interests, which is itself a $10K–$50K engagement depending on complexity. Trust restructuring costs are separate and not part of the family-law attorney’s bill — typically $25K–$100K depending on the number of jurisdictions and trusts involved.
At $30M–$100M, each side runs $50K–$200K. Multi-counsel teams. Trust restructuring $100K–$500K. Postnups, when later required after a liquidity event, are comparable in scope to the original prenup.
At $100M+, each side runs $200K–$1M+ for the prenup work itself, with overlapping trust counsel, corporate counsel for any business interest, and international counsel for cross-border issues. The planning is typically a multi-year engagement, not a discrete document.
Indirect costs that don’t show up on the family-law attorney’s invoice but are real: pre-marital trust funding can use up lifetime gift-tax exemption or crystallize gift-tax exposure (coordinated with the family’s estate planner, not the divorce lawyer); and 3–12 months of negotiation meetings between the couple, their counsel, and (often) the family office, immediately before the wedding.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs
The most-cited soft cost: the negotiation can poison the wedding. HNW family-law attorneys universally recommend starting the conversation 9–12 months out, partly because rushed prenups are the most-attacked at divorce and partly because the disclosure-schedule reckoning — “you have how much in that account?” — arrives in a window that is supposed to be about floral arrangements. Couples consistently describe the prenup process as the most stressful part of the engagement.
Dynamic provisions are hard to design well. Sunset clauses (the agreement expires after a fixed number of years, or after children are born) reduce the agreement’s brittleness but expose the wealthier spouse to risk of an inadequate later arrangement. Inflation-adjusted spousal-support floors look fair at signing and unfair 20 years later, or vice versa. Bonus clauses (“the wealthier spouse pays an additional sum for each five-year anniversary, and an additional sum per child”) address some of this but introduce their own gaming risks.
Sealed but not invisible. The prenup itself is private, but the existence of one rarely is. Once a divorce is filed, the agreement is filed with the court and becomes part of the litigation record. Sealing the agreement is possible in many jurisdictions but is itself a contested motion. Famous-couple divorces almost always result in the prenup’s key terms surfacing in press coverage — which is why the educational reporting on Bezos / Sánchez, Brady / Bündchen, and Gates can credibly describe the architecture even when the documents themselves are not public.
Choice-of-law surprises. A prenup signed in New York can end up litigated in Florida if that is where the couple eventually settles. The governing-law clause helps but is not absolute; in community-property states, certain provisions (waiver of spousal support, treatment of community-property additions) may be reformed by the destination court even when the agreement says otherwise.
Trust restructuring is largely irreversible. Funding an irrevocable trust is, in most cases, irrevocable. If the marriage ends amicably ten years later and the family wants to unwind the structure, the structure does not always cleanly unwind. The protection works because it is permanent; the cost is that it is permanent.
Postnup pressure dynamics. A postnup proposed mid-marriage to resolve a brewing conflict frequently produces an agreement a court later treats as the product of coercion. The Minnesota two-year-unenforceability rule is an explicit response to that pattern. Other states are watching it.
What people get wrong
Four corrections.
“A prenup means they don’t trust each other.” Closer to the opposite, at wealth. The disclosure schedule attached to a properly negotiated prenup is usually the most complete financial conversation the couple ever has. Walking jointly through real-estate holdings, business equity, debts, retirement accounts, contingent trust interests, and prior tax returns is the moment the financial picture becomes shared. Couples who avoid the conversation in the name of romance are choosing not to know each other’s finances, which is a different kind of choice.
“The prenup decides what happens at divorce.” Only partly. The prenup decides what counts as separate property and, subject to state limits, what happens with spousal support. It does not decide child custody, child support, or what happens with assets the couple acquired jointly during the marriage. And a prenup can be partly invalidated — typically on inadequate disclosure or unconscionability grounds — leaving the rest of the divorce to play out under the state’s default rules. Treating the document as a single point of certainty overstates what any contract can do.
“Trusts replace the need for a prenup.” They do not. A pre-marital irrevocable trust does most of the asset-protection work, but the prenup is what governs everything outside the trust: future earnings, jointly-acquired assets, a primary residence purchased during the marriage, retirement accounts, the spouse’s compensation. Trust and prenup together do the job that neither does alone.
“Celebrity prenups are sealed and we don’t know what’s in them.” Mostly true for the documents themselves, but the public coverage often gets the architecture roughly right. Reporting on the Brady / Bündchen “ironclad” agreement and the Bezos / Sánchez “multi-million” agreement per Fortune accurately conveys that the agreements exist, that they pre-define separate-property treatment of the major assets, and that they enable fast, low-litigation divorces. The reader who comes away with “billionaires have prenups, regular millionaires don’t” has the wrong picture. Across $1M+ households generally, the rate is about 80%.
Bottom line
The answer to the Million Dollar Question is C: about 80% of US households at $1M+ investable assets sign a prenuptial agreement before marriage, per industry survey work cited in HelloPrenup’s 2024 statistics, versus roughly 15–20% in the general married population per LawDepot’s prenup survey and the Harris/Axios 2024 polling. The rate continues to rise with wealth band — effectively universal at $30M+ — but it is the $1M–$5M tier where the contrast with the general population is most striking.
The deeper takeaway: the prenup is one of three load-bearing components, and the two that get less attention often do more of the protection. Pre-marital trust restructuring re-papers the wealth into structures the marriage does not touch. Full, contemporaneous disclosure makes the prenup itself enforceable. The contract sits on top of those two and governs the rest. A prenup is a contract about a possibility no one entering a marriage wants to think about, and at $1M+ wealth the consequence of not having one — years of contested divorce, forced sale of a family business, a result neither party would have agreed to in advance — is large enough that the soft cost of the conversation is worth paying. The well-negotiated version is, almost incidentally, one of the most-thorough financial conversations a couple ever has.
Related reading:
- Dating: Love, Trust, and Wealth — how the partnership got to the prenup conversation in the first place.
- Legacy: Trusts, Foundations, and the Architecture of Family Wealth — the dynasty-trust and SLAT structures the prenup has to talk to.
- Family Office: How the Wealthy Run Their Money Like a Business — who actually coordinates the disclosure schedules.
- Children: Education, Inheritance, and the Heir Question — the inheritance constituency that second-marriage prenups protect.
- Wealth Levels: Life at $1M, $10M, $100M, and $1B — the bracket shorthand this piece sits inside.
