The number of people living alone has hit a record high of above eight million and nearly half of them are over-65s.
Some 3.9 million pensioners are living by themselves – up 500,000 from 2008, according to Office for National Statistics for 2018.
The total number of one-person households had gone up sharply from the 7.7 million in 2017.
Sophie Sanders of the ONS said: “The way people live has been changing. There are more people living alone than ever before.”
Married couples have fallen from 69% to 66% of all families in the past 10 years while those cohabiting rose from 15% to 18%.
The number of same-sex couple families has surged from 152,000 in 2015 to 232,000 in 2018.
And about a quarter of young adults, aged 20 to 34, lived with parents – a similar figure to 2017.
