Yes, the U.S. birth rate is declining and has been for over a decade. From 2010 to 2023, annual birth rates fell 17 percent, dropping from nearly 13 births to fewer than 11 births per 1,000 people. The total fertility rate, which estimates how many children a woman will have over her lifetime, fell from roughly 2.1 in 1990 to 1.62 in 2023. That puts the U.S. well below the replacement level of 2.1, the threshold needed for a population to maintain its size without immigration.
How Far Below Replacement the U.S. Has Fallen
A total fertility rate of 2.1 is considered the break-even point: enough births to replace the current population over time. At 1.62, the U.S. is producing roughly 23 percent fewer births than that benchmark. This isn’t a temporary dip. The decline has been steady since the early 2000s, with only brief plateaus along the way.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that declining fertility will cause annual deaths to exceed annual births starting in 2030. Without immigration, the U.S. population would begin to shrink that same year.
Women Are Having Children Later
One of the clearest shifts is the age at which women become mothers. The average age at first birth rose from 26.6 in 2016 to 27.5 in 2023. That’s nearly a full year of change in just seven years, continuing a longer trend that has been building for decades. Birth rates among women in their early 20s have dropped sharply, while rates among women in their mid-to-late 30s have held steady or increased. The result is fewer total births, because starting later generally means having fewer children overall.
The Cost of Raising a Family
The financial pressure of having children in the U.S. is a significant factor. The USDA estimated that parents would spend roughly $233,610 to raise a child born in 2015 from birth through age 17, and costs have only risen since then. Childcare alone can consume a large share of a household budget, particularly for families with more than one young child.
A 2024 analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services noted that high healthcare and childcare costs are “a disincentive for families to raise children” and may be contributing to the decline. The connection between cost and family size is intuitive: when housing, childcare, and healthcare consume more of a family’s income, many couples delay having children or decide to have fewer.
Where Birth Rates Vary Across the Country
The decline isn’t uniform. In 2023, fertility rates (measured as births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44) ranged widely by state. The five states with the lowest rates were:
- Vermont: 42.1
- Rhode Island: 45.2
- Oregon: 45.9
- New Hampshire: 46.8
- Maine: 47.0
The five highest were:
- South Dakota: 65.6
- Nebraska: 62.5
- Alaska: 62.4
- North Dakota: 62.0
- Texas: 60.6
States in the upper Midwest and parts of the South tend to have higher fertility rates, while New England and the Pacific Northwest sit at the low end. Even the highest-fertility states, though, are well below where they were a generation ago.
What a Shrinking Birth Rate Means Long Term
When fewer babies are born each year, the population gradually shifts older. A larger share of people move into retirement while a smaller share enters the workforce. Economists track this through something called the dependency ratio: the number of people too young or too old to work compared to the working-age population. In the U.S., that ratio was 59 in 2010, rose to 64 in 2019, and is projected to reach 73 by 2050, driven primarily by population aging.
A rising dependency ratio strains systems that rely on working-age taxpayers to fund benefits for retirees, Social Security and Medicare being the most obvious examples. Fewer workers supporting more retirees means either higher taxes on those workers, reduced benefits, or some combination. Labor shortages in certain industries become more likely as well, particularly in healthcare, construction, and other fields that depend on a steady pipeline of younger workers.
Immigration has historically offset some of the gap. The Congressional Budget Office’s latest projections indicate that net immigration will become an increasingly important source of population growth as births continue to fall. How much immigration policy changes in the coming years will play a major role in determining whether the U.S. population grows, stabilizes, or contracts.