U.S. births fell last year, offsetting 2024 growth and dashing hopes of an upward trend

According to recently released preliminary data, the U.S. birth rate will decline slightly in 2025.

Just over 3.6 million births have been reported through birth certificates, or about 24,000 fewer than in 2024. The count appears to confirm predictions by some experts who suspected 22,250 births rise in 2024 marked the beginning of an uptrend.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its preliminary birth data late last week, filling in two months of missing data and providing the first good look at last year’s tally.

The numbers posted cover nearly all babies born in 2025, according to the CDC. Data is still being collected and analyzed, but the final tally may add only « a few thousand extra 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 get 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, as announced by the creditexecutive orderthe purpose is to expand the availability of in vitro fertilization and lower its costs and support the idea« baby bonuses »which may encourage more couples to have children.

So far, only the number of births is available – not birth rates and other data that can give an idea of ​​who is having babies.

For example, although the birth rate increased in 2024 compared to the previous year,the birth rate actually fellsaid Karen Guzzo, a family population researcher 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 wouldn’t expect fertility or birth rates to increase; I would expect them to decrease because fertility is strongly related to economic conditions and uncertainty, » Guzzo said in an email.

Also, most of those born in 2025 would have been children born in 2024, when people were concerned about affordability and political polarization, he added.

As a general trend, birth and birth rates in the United States have been declining for years. They then dropped in 2020rosetwo years in a row after that, experts were partly to blame for delayed pregnancies amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A two percent drop in 2023 brought the number of births in the United States to less than 3.6 millionthe lowest one-year resultsince 1979.

This story was originally published at Fortune.com

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