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US births will fall slightly in 2025, according to newly posted provisional data.
A little more than 3.6 million births were reported through birth certificates, or about 24,000 fewer than in 2024. The decrease seems to confirm the predictions of some experts, who doubted a 22,250 births increase in 2024 marking the beginning of a new trend.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its provisional birth data last week, filling in two months of missing data and offering the first good look at last year’s tally.
The posted numbers account for nearly all babies born in 2025, according to the CDC. The data is still being compiled and analyzed, but the final tally may only add up to “a few thousand more births,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees birth and death tracking at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Experts say people are getting married later and are also worried about their ability to have the money, health insurance and other resources needed to raise children in a stable environment.
Last year, the Trump administration took steps to encourage more births, such as issuing aexecutive orderaimed at expanding access and reducing the cost of in vitro fertilization and supporting the idea of“baby bonuses”which may encourage more couples to have children.
Currently, only the number of births is available – and not the number of births and other information that can give ideas about who has children.
For example, although births increased to 2024 last year, thefertility rate actually fellsays Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the University of North Carolina.
The fertility rate is a statistic that describes whether each generation has enough children to replace itself – about 2.1 children per woman. It’s been sliding in America for nearly two decades as more women wait longer to have children or don’t have children at all.
For 2025, “I don’t expect birth rates or fertility to increase; I expect them to fall because births are related to economic conditions and uncertainty,” Guzzo said in an email.
Also, most of those born in 2025 will be children conceived in 2024, when people are worried about affordability and political polarization, he added.
As a general trend, US births and birth rates have been falling for years. They fall in 2020, thenpinkfor two consecutive years after that, an increase experts partly attributed to pregnancies terminated amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
A 2% decline in 2023 puts US births at less than 3.6 million, thelowest one year tallysince 1979.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
