The total fertility rate in the United States was 1.63 births per woman in 2024, based on provisional data from the CDC. That figure sits well below the replacement level of 2.1, the threshold at which a population sustains its size without immigration. The U.S. has been below replacement since 2010, and the rate has hovered near historic lows for several consecutive years.
What the Numbers Look Like Right Now
In 2024, there were 3,622,673 births in the United States. The total fertility rate of 1.63 represents a slight uptick from 2023’s rate of 1.62 but remains in the same narrow band the country has occupied since 2020. For context, the rate was 1.66 in 2021, dipped to 1.64 in 2022, then dropped again before the small 2024 rebound. None of these year-to-year shifts represent a meaningful change in direction.
The last time the U.S. fertility rate reached replacement level was 2009, when it hit 2.1. It briefly rose to about 2.2 in 2007-2008, then began a steady decline that accelerated after the Great Recession. By 2019, the rate had already fallen to 1.7, and it has continued drifting lower since.
Who Is Having Children, and When
The most striking shift in American fertility over the past three decades is age. Women under 30 are having far fewer babies than they once did, while women 30 and older are having significantly more. Between 1990 and 2023, births to teens dropped 73%, births to women ages 20 to 24 fell 44%, and births to women 25 to 29 fell 23%. The teen birth rate specifically plummeted from 59.9 per 1,000 females in 1990 to just 13.1 in 2023.
Older age groups tell the opposite story. Women 35 to 39 had 90% more births in 2023 than in 1990. Women 40 and older saw a 193% increase over the same period. The birth rate for women 45 and older, while still small in absolute terms, jumped 450%. The peak childbearing age group is now 30 to 34, with a rate of 94.3 births per 1,000 women, slightly higher than the 91.0 rate for women 25 to 29. That’s a reversal from 1990, when women in their late twenties had the highest rates by a wide margin.
Differences by Race and Ethnicity
Fertility rates vary across racial and ethnic groups, though no group is at replacement level. In 2023, Hispanic women had the highest general fertility rate at 65.0 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. Black women followed at 53.5, then non-Hispanic white women at 51.6, and Asian women at 47.7. These gaps have narrowed considerably over time as rates have declined across all groups.
State-by-State Variation
Geography matters. South Dakota had the highest fertility rate in the country in 2023 at 65.6 births per 1,000 women, followed by Nebraska at 62.5 and Alaska at 62.4. At the other end, Vermont had the lowest rate at 42.1, with the District of Columbia close behind at 43.0 and Rhode Island at 45.2. States with lower costs of living, younger populations, and more rural communities tend to cluster at the top, while states in the Northeast and those with large urban, highly educated populations tend to sit at the bottom.
Why Fewer Americans Are Having Children
No single factor explains the decline, but several forces are reinforcing each other. Rising levels of education and workforce participation among women have led to delayed marriage and childbearing. This is one of the most consistent patterns across developed countries: as more women pursue higher education and careers, birth rates fall. It’s not that educated women don’t want children. Many do, just fewer of them, and later in life, which compresses the window for having larger families.
Financial pressures compound the delay. Student debt, housing costs, health insurance expenses, and the price of childcare all weigh on decisions about starting a family. Young adults today face a different economic landscape than their parents did at the same age, and those costs don’t just delay the first child. They often reduce the total number of children a couple ultimately has. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 accelerated the fertility decline, and birth rates never recovered to pre-recession levels even as the economy improved.
There’s also a household dynamics factor that researchers have identified. In families where housework and childcare responsibilities fall unevenly on one partner (usually the mother), couples are less likely to have additional children. Countries that have implemented policies to distribute caregiving more equally, such as paid parental leave for both parents, have in some cases stabilized their fertility rates, though none in the developed world has returned to replacement level through policy alone.
What a Below-Replacement Rate Means
A fertility rate of 1.63 doesn’t mean the U.S. population is shrinking right now. Immigration continues to drive population growth, and the large number of women currently of childbearing age means total births remain in the millions. But if the rate stays at this level for decades, the math eventually catches up. The working-age population shrinks relative to the number of retirees, putting pressure on Social Security, Medicare, and the broader economy’s ability to produce goods and services.
The U.S. is not in as steep a decline as countries like South Korea (with a fertility rate below 0.8) or Japan (around 1.2), but it’s following the same general trajectory that nearly every wealthy nation has experienced. The 2024 rate of 1.63 is roughly 22% below what would be needed to maintain the population through births alone.