Estimating the Cost of Being a Same-Sex Couple

Proponents of legalizing same-sex marriage often assert that same-sex couples are unfairly denied economic benefits provided to married couples.  In an endeavor to put a number on this argument, the New York Times set out to determine “a couple’s lifetime cost of being gay.”  Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Liber, The High Price of Being a Gay Couple, N.Y. Times, Oct. 2, 2009. 

Although the monetary calculation will vary depending on specific circumstances, the article provides the following:

Our goal was to create a hypothetical gay couple whose situation would be similar to a heterosexual couple’s. So we gave the couple two children and assumed that one partner would stay home for five years to take care of them. We also considered the taxes in the three states that have the highest estimated gay populations — New York, California and Florida. We gave our couple an income of $140,000, which is about the average income in those three states for unmarried same-sex partners who are college-educated, 30 to 40 years old and raising children under the age of 18.

Here is what we came up with. In our worst case, the couple’s lifetime cost of being gay was $467,562. But the number fell to $41,196 in the best case for a couple with significantly better health insurance, plus lower taxes and other costs.

See Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Liber, The High Price of Being a Gay Couple, N.Y. Times, Oct. 2, 2009.  The article provides detailed discussion of the reported findings.

Special thanks to Joel Dobris (Professor of Law, UC Davis School of Law) for bringing this article to my attention.