This article examines the impact of landholding and differences in local economies on age at marriage, on frequency of service and on household size and structure in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Particular stress is placed on the role of economic rather than cultural factors as determinants of regional variations in marriage age and household structures. Households were more complex whenever land, the accumulation of capital and multiple occupations were required for economic activity. Conversely, wage work – whether in fishing or agriculture and regardless of geographical location (for example in eastern as well as western Finland) – favoured the formation of small nuclear households. Some aspects of the family system (servanthood and a late age at marriage) fit the characteristics of the north-west European household system as delineated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett better than others (frequency of complex households). It is concluded that there is no inevitable correlation between geographic location and the characteristics of a society's family system and that the model of the north-west European household system does not accommodate those societies where people were in a position to build strategies based on the continuous possession of land.