US births dropped last year, suggesting the 2024 uptick was short-lived

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. births declined slightly in 2025, according to newly released preliminary data.

A little more than 3.6 million births were declared on birth certificates, around 24,000 fewer than in 2024. This decline seems to confirm the predictions of some experts, who doubted that a slight increase in births in 2024 would mark the start of an upward trend.

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

The published figures represent almost all babies born in 2025, according to the CDC. The data is still being compiled and analyzed, but the final tally may add only “a few thousand additional 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 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 an executive order to expand access to and reduce costs for in vitro fertilization, and supporting the idea of ​​”baby bonuses” that could encourage more couples to have children.

So far, only the number of births is available – not birth rates and other information that can provide insight into who will have babies.

For example, although births increased in 2024 compared to the previous year, the fertility rate actually decreased, noted Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the University of North Carolina.

The fertility rate is a statistic describing whether each generation has enough children to replace itself – about 2.1 children per woman. In the United States, the situation has been declining for nearly two decades, as more and more women wait longer to have children, or not have them at all.

For 2025, “I would not expect birth or fertility rates to increase; I would expect them to decrease because childbearing is closely linked to economic conditions and uncertainty,” Guzzo said in an email.

Additionally, most births in 2025 would have been to children conceived in 2024, as people worried about affordability and political polarization, she added.

Generally speaking, births and birth rates in the United States have been declining for years. They fell in 2020, then rose for two straight years, an increase that experts attribute in part to postponed pregnancies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A 2% decline in 2023 puts the number of U.S. births below 3.6 million, the lowest one-year figure since 1979.

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