The U.S. birthrate declined to a record low in 2025, according to new federal data, continuing a decades-long trend since the nation's last major pre-recession high in 2007.
The provisional number of births in the U.S. was 3,606,400 in 2025, down 1% from 3,628,934 in 2024, while the general fertility rate, which measures births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, slipped to 53.1 from 53.8 a year earlier, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
The new figures underscore how far the country has moved from 2007, when the general fertility rate stood at 69.5, before the financial crisis helped trigger a broad decline in births that has never fully reversed.
Teen birthrates continued to drive much of the drop. The birthrate for teenagers ages 15 to 19 fell 7% in 2025 to 11.7 births per 1,000 females, another record low, and the number of births to teens dropped to 125,933.
Federal researchers said the teen birthrate is now down 72% from 2007 and 81% from its 1991 peak, extending one of the steepest and longest-running demographic shifts in modern U.S. data.
Meanwhile, births continued to shift toward older mothers.
The birthrate for women ages 30 to 34 rose to 96.2 births per 1,000 in 2025 from 93.7 in 2024, while the rate for women ages 35 to 39 also edged higher to 55.1 from 54.3.
The rate for women ages 20 to 24 fell to 52.2 from 55.8, and the rate for women ages 25 to 29 declined to 85.6 from 89.5.
That pattern has reinforced a long-running debate over whether Americans are having fewer children overall or simply postponing parenthood into their 30s.
"They weren't opting out of motherhood; they were delaying it," said Martha Bailey, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Even so, the broader demographic picture remains unsettled.
The Census Bureau said in January that the U.S. population growth slowed to 0.5% between July 2024 and July 2025, with the nation adding 1.8 million people, as a sharp fall in net international migration combined with much lower natural increase than in earlier decades.
Census officials said natural change, defined as births minus deaths, was about 519,000 during that period, far below the 1.1 million recorded in 2017 and well under the 1.6 million to 1.9 million range common during the 2000 to 2010 decade.
The Congressional Budget Office has also lowered its long-term assumptions for both fertility and immigration, saying the U.S. is now projected to grow more slowly through 2055 than it previously expected.
For economists and demographers, the stakes go well beyond annual birth totals.
A prolonged stretch of lower fertility can reshape the labor force, slow household formation, and intensify pressure on programs such as Social Security and Medicare as the population ages.
While the U.S. continues to grow, Thursday's numbers show that growth is becoming more dependent on migration and less on births than it was for much of the past generation.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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