One month’s notice for marriage in Australia

By Sarah AirdCategories: Marriage Legalities

This entry is part 26 of 31 in the series Marriage Legalities

One of the cornerstones of the legal marriage system in Australia is the requirement to give one month’s notice. You can’t wake up one morning and say, “hey, let’s get married today,” like you can in some American states. You can’t even wake up one day and say, “hey, let’s get married in three days,” like you can in New Zealand. No, in Australia you must lodge a Notice of Intended Marriage (NOIM) with your authorised celebrant at least one month (and no more than 18 months) before your chosen wedding date.

Definition

You’ll see all sorts of random things on other celebrants’ websites: 30 days, 28 days, a month and a day. None of them are correct. The notice period under section 42 of the Marriage Act 1961 is one month. Section 2G of the Acts Interpretation Act 1901 sets out how we calculate one month. It says:

In any Act, month means a period:

(a) starting at the start of any day of one of the calendar months, and

(b) ending:

(i) immediately before the start of the corresponding day of the next calendar month, or

(ii) if there is no such day – at the end of the next calendar month.

Example 1: A month starting on 15 December in a year ends immediately before 15 January in the next year.

Example 2: A month starting on 31 August in a year ends at the end of September in that year (because September is the calendar month coming after August and does not have 31 days).

Honestly, most celebrants can’t figure out what that means, so I’m going to give you some examples as they apply directly to marriage.

If you lodge your NOIM on 15 March, you can get married any day from 15 April onwards. In other words, if there’s a corresponding day in the following month, that’s the day you can get married on.

If you lodge your NOIM on 31 October, you can get married any day from 1 December onwards. In other words, if there’s no corresponding day in the following month, you can get married from the 1st of the month after that.

And remember, the NOIM expires after 18 months. Let’s look at some examples for that.

If you lodge your NOIM on 15 March 2022, you can get married any day between 15 April 2022 and 14 September 2023.

If you lodge your NOIM on 31 October 2022, you can get married any day between 1 December 2022 and 30 April 2024.

Hopefully you can extrapolate from those examples the date you need to give notice by, but your celebrant will be able to help you with it.

Why do we have to give one month’s notice?

I’ve recently been doing some research on when and why the one month’s notice period requirement came into being. As it turns out, it wasn’t always a requirement to give one month’s notice to marry in Australia. Prior to 1976, the notice period was one week. Before 1963, in some states it was as little as three days. So what happened?

No fault divorce. That’s what happened. Prior to the introduction of the Family Law Act 1975, if you wanted a divorce, you had to prove there was a problem (such as adultery or habitual drunkenness). But after the Whitlam Government introduced no-fault divorce, the only requirements were that one party had to say their marriage had irretrievably broken down, and the couple had to have been separated for at least 12 months.

In the first quarter of 1975, there were 6261 divorce applications. The new law came into force on 5 January 1976. In the first quarter of 1976, there were 21,846 divorce applications. The government FREAKED OUT and decided they’d better change the marriage laws to make sure people weren’t rushing into marriage without really thinking about it. So among other things, they extended the marriage notice period from 7 days to one month.

And that’s why you have to give one month’s notice to get married in Australia!