Kai Amos does not know adult life without her fiance, Garret. They are high school sweethearts who met as teens in Idaho and moved across the country to New York together. They got engaged last year and will be married in September. Their days hum with the constant buzz of wedding planning: picking vendors, writing the guest list, dress shopping. And also meeting with lawyers; the happy couple are working on a prenuptial agreement, to protect their respective assets should they ever get divorced.
Amos, who is 30, understands the concept has baggage. Her more conservative friends and family back home in Idaho view prenups as something a rich man (and it is always a man) uses to rein ina woman he suspects of gold digging (and it is always a woman, usually younger). “It was always like the idea of a man trying to take advantage of a woman,” Amos said, “and therefore, it has this negative connection that the man is not going to be a trusted partner.”
But Amos has capital of her own. She has always been ambitious, and grew up envisioning herself as someone who would “make a lot of money”. She did, working her way up in the advertising department of Amazon before becoming a full-time content creator who is launching a scalpcare line. She has stocks and an investment portfolio. She is no fortune hunter, and she witnessed the pain of divorce negotiations between her parents during their separation.
“I love myself enough to protect myself in worst-case scenarios,” Amos said. “I would rather be having a conversation about what’s fair now, with somebody who loves me, than with someone who hates me because we fell out of love.”
Such conversations are happening more often between young couples across the country. “Society is in the midst of a zillennial prenup boom,” read a Los Angeles Times feature published last month, which credited it to the cusp generation’s familiarity with economic turmoil and eagerness to embrace the concept as an act of “self-care”. In 2022, a New Yorker piece about prenups among the non-rich cited Harris Poll data indicating that 40% of married or engaged people between the ages of 18 and 34 had signed such documents; this year, a Harris Poll conducted with Bloomberg found that 53% of engaged or married Americans under the age of 45 did so.
It’s also never been easier to draft a prenup. Couples can still go the traditional route, hiring matrimonial lawyers to start a months-long mediation process, as Amos and her fiance did. Or they can turn to one of many online prenup platforms, which often cost less.
Julia Rodgers, a Massachusetts-based divorce attorney, started one such platform, HelloPrenup, in 2021. “At the time, these millennial clients would come to me and say, ‘this is very expensive,’ because the retainer was $3,500 per person,” she said. “If they had to choose between getting flowers for their wedding or getting a prenup, they’d stick with the flowers. They were excited about the wedding, and the prenup seemed kind of dark.”
Prenups are increasingly appealing for young couples of all tax brackets. Gen Z are becoming entrepreneurs, surpassing baby boomers with the most first business starts this year. Not all those businesses are profitable, but they could be someday, and people draft prenups with future or hypothetical assets in mind.
“This generation has more interest in self-employment, and you’ll see provisions about how to divide up a business,” said Elizabeth R Carter, a lawyer and professor at Louisiana State University.They are also saddled with debt: 11 million gen Z Americans and another 11 million millennials carry student loans, for example. Couples can use prenups to ensure that debt stays with its corresponding spouse.
“Historically people would say, we didn’t need a prenup when we got married, because all we had was debt,” said Carter. “But that is exactly a reason to get one, and why we’re seeing more and more prenups, particularly when you add into the fact that people who are most likely to get married are college educated to start with.”
Luckier couples may be expecting a financial windfall from the bank of mom and dad; the so-called “great wealth transfer” estimates that $124tn will go from wealthy older generations to theirsuccessors in the next 20-plus years, with millennial heirs benefiting the most. Parents may insist on a prenup to make sure their money stays in the family.
Rodgers said the average annual income of a HelloPrenup user is $78,000, and women initiate just over half of all prenups on the site. “This is something that has dramatically shifted in over the last 10 years,” she said. She partly cites pop culture: Belle Burden’s Strangers, a 2026 memoir of the blue-blooded heiress’ financially crippling divorce, wherein Burden agreed to enter into a prenup that ultimately disadvantaged her, was huge for business. “It was everywhere. Women realized that a prenup is protective,” Rodgers said. (The infamous “Coldplay kiss cam affair”, where two married executives were caught cheating on their spouses at a Coldplay concert, led to a 3% bump in infidelity clauses on HelloPrenup.)
Libby Leffler runs an online service called First, which offers “self-serve” prenups starting at $649 to couples who want to “marry smart”. One in four of its customers this year have been under 30. “Gen Z already run their relationships a little bit like a shared ledger,” Leffler said. “If you can request down to the penny for brunch, you can have a conversation about what happens to your savings account if you get divorced. A prenup is really just scaling that up.”
A zillennial’s prenup might not read like the ones her parents signed (or should have signed). There are assets that are uniquely of her era, such as crypto, and new concerns such as how to split custody of pets. Influencer couples count their social media pages as digital assets, explicitly writing in who gets to run the accounts and what they cannot post after a split. Chloé Daniels, a financial literacy professional who posts money tips to her 175,000 TikTok followers, included a non-disparagement penalty in the prenup she wrote with her now-husband, Charles. “I think we settled on $250,000,” said Daniels, who is 35 and lives in San Diego. “We wanted to make sure it would hurt.”
There are also prenup updates for the ethically non-monogamous crowd. A traditional anti-cheating clause imposes penalties for stepping outside the relationship, such as a fine or asset forfeiture. Rodgers’ team recently wrote an infidelity clause for a pair of young swingers. “They said, certain sexual behavior was acceptable if both spouses were in the room at the same time,” she recalled. “But if one half was not present and there was a third party there, then it was infidelity and there’s a certain financial penalty associated.”
Both Amos and Daniels found that instead of being divisive, drafting prenups strengthened their relationships.
Amos said that working on a prenup encouraged “radical transparency and honesty” between her and her fiance, Garret. “I would even beg to argue that if you’re not having these conversations, then what kind of relationship are you in?” she said.
Daniels called writing a prenup “an act of love” that she completed for herself and her spouse. “Even if you do something that really screws me over and I hate you at the end of this, you’re still in a place where your finances are treated fairly,” she said. “If I ever have to go through the process of a divorce, it’s not going to be this awful, long, drawn out thing for either of us.”
