More than one in five marriages in Iran ended in divorce last year - despite the government's push for more couples to wed and have children to reverse slowing population growth.
The annual figures published on Tuesday also showed fewer people were getting married and the statistics coincide with rising concern about family breakdown in the Islamic republic.
The country's Registration Office, which records the number of new marriages as well as those that have split, said the divorce rate continued to edge up in the year ending March 2014.
"Some 158,753 couples filed for divorce in the last Iranian calendar year, increasing by 4.6 per cent from 2013," Ahmad Toysarkani, head of the office, told the official IRNA news agency.
With 757,197 couples tying the knot in the same period, the marriage rate fell by 4.4 per cent.
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Iran's divorce rate has jumped from 12 per cent to 21 per cent since 2007.
Toysarkani blamed the sharp rise in divorce on family interference - including non-respect for the financial terms governing a marriage - poverty, drugs and domestic violence.
Iran's population growth plummeted to only 1.29 per cent in the past 12 months, the lowest in the region.
"The rate could fall to zero in the next 30 years," Mohammad Nazemi Ardakani, an official at the national birth registry, said recently.
In measures aimed at addressing an ageing population, Iran's parliament is discussing a bill that would ban vasectomies and tighten the nation's abortion laws.
