2025 Bride Price Lawsuits Are on the Rise
The story from a Hubei lawyer is eye-opening. These days they’re handling two such cases a month—before, divorce cases (especially around bride price) were rare. Both of these recent cases involved marriages lasting less than a year.
Generally, if a couple has been married for nearly a year and mediation fails, courts typically order the wife to return about 30% of the bride price. If there’s evidence they never actually lived together as spouses, the refund portion can be increased. If there are children involved, fault proportion will be further adjusted. If the husband is at fault, he may not need to return anything at all—or could even owe compensation to the wife (provided the evidence is solid).
Based on these two Hubei cases, the local bride price hovers around 100,000 yuan, with the traditional “three golds” jewelry set. This contrasts with other regions where totals run into several hundred thousand yuan and include the “five golds” set.
From a legal standpoint, the 2021 regulation specifies three conditions under which bride price must be returned: (1) the couple never registered their marriage; (2) they registered but never actually lived together; (3) the payment caused the payer severe financial hardship.
Only the bride price itself and expensive “three golds” or “five golds” jewelry qualify. Red envelopes amounting to a few thousand yuan do not count.
The most absurd case I’ve seen involved a 200,000 yuan bride price arranged through a matchmaking agency, but the wife only actually received 88,000 yuan. The couple never clarified the discrepancy over the bride price. Upon divorce, she returned only the 88,000 yuan she kept; the matchmaking agency held the rest. Since there was no documented proof of the actual fund flow, the courts couldn’t recover it.
These days, some younger couples are being proactive—setting up prenuptial property agreements that address bride price return and other divorce scenarios, then notarizing them. This is worth encouraging; at least it prevents things from getting too ugly if a divorce ever happens.