ABSTRACT
Gray divorce, marital dissolution at Age 50 and older, has become an increasingly important family transition with implications for later-life kinship, economic security, intergenerational ties, and postmarital adjustment. This scoping review maps antecedents, outcomes, moderators, and family-theory gaps across 25 empirical studies published between 2012 and 2025 and identified through five major databases, Google Scholar, and targeted citation-based updates. The evidence shows that gray divorce is most consistently associated with marital biography and socioeconomic position, including higher-order marriages, shorter union duration, lower wealth, non-homeownership, marital quality, and emerging evidence on employment insecurity and late-life labor market shocks. Outcomes vary across domains are as follows: Women generally face sharper economic declines; depressive symptoms, psychological distress, and service use often intensify around the divorce transition before receding; and social consequences depend on repartnering, living arrangements, gendered parent-adult child ties, and family-system resources. The review advances a family science interpretation of gray divorce as a heterogeneous transition shaped by life course timing, cumulative disadvantage, family stress processes, boundary reorganization, and crisis, chronic strain, and convalescence trajectories. Future work should expand cross-national evidence, test mechanisms directly, integrate family-theory models more explicitly, and evaluate policy and practice levers that support older adults and their families across the divorce timeline.