585,396 babies were born in 2025, the fewest in any year since 1977 and a fourth straight fall in the fertility rate. Whether today's twentysomethings are delaying parenthood or forgoing it is still unknown — and the answer matters for how much strain an ageing population puts on the public finances the OBR expects to come under growing pressure over the next fifty years.
England and Wales recorded 585,396 live births in 2025, a fall of 1.6% on 2024's 594,677 and the lowest calendar-year total since 1977, when 569,259 babies were born — still the fourth-lowest count in a century, per ONS.1 The provisional total fertility rate (TFR) — a period measure: the number of children a woman would have if she experienced 2025's age-specific birth rates throughout her childbearing years — fell to 1.39, a fourth consecutive annual fall.1 Deaths registered rose slightly to 570,988, so births still exceeded deaths by 14,408 — down sharply from 26,064 in 2024, and a much smaller margin than the natural increase England and Wales ran throughout the 2010s.12
A word on measurement: the raw count can fall for two different reasons — women having children at lower rates, or fewer women of childbearing age being around to have them. The TFR is built to strip out the second effect, so comparing the two tells us roughly how much is rate versus composition. Here they move almost together: births fell 1.6% and the TFR fell 1.4%, a gap of under 0.2 percentage points. That suggests this year's fall is mostly a rate effect, not a shrinking pool of mothers — but ONS has not yet published final 2025 age-specific fertility rates to confirm it properly; only a provisional, country-level TFR is out so far, with the fuller breakdown due later in 2026.1
A single year's TFR conflates two very different things: people having children later than their predecessors, and people ending up with fewer children overall. ONS solves this with a second measure, completed family size — the number of children a group of women actually had, tallied once they're past childbearing age — but it can only be calculated once a cohort has finished, decades after the fact.3 The most recent cohort to complete is women born in 1979: by 2024, when they turned 45, they had had 1.95 children on average, the highest completed figure since the 1961 cohort and barely below the 2.1 needed to replace the population without migration.3
That's the reassuring half of the picture: for every cohort born since the 1930s, a falling number of children by age 30 has been followed by a recovery in completed family size, as women had children later rather than not at all — true of the 1960s and 1970s cohorts, and true again, modestly, of the 1979 cohort.3 The unresolved half is the cohorts behind them. The average number of children a woman had by 30 fell from 1.02 for those born in the mid-1980s to an all-time low of 0.8 for the 1992 cohort, the most recent for which ONS has published this measure — a fall of 18% in under a decade, off a base that was already the product of decades of postponement.3 Nobody knows yet whether the 1992 cohort, and the cohorts born since, will do what the 1970s cohort did and catch up in their thirties and forties, or whether this is where delay finally becomes forgone. Their completed family size won't be measurable until the early 2040s.3
Two terminology notes worth being precise about. First, the TFR is a behavioural measure of the rate at which children are currently being born, not a measure of biological capacity to conceive — a falling TFR says nothing about fertility treatment demand or fecundity, and this piece excludes fertility-clinic sources for that reason. Second, the Resolution Foundation, a think tank, separately reports that the share of women childless at 30 "surged from 48% for those born in the late-1980s to 58% for those born in the early-1990s."8 That is a genuinely striking figure, but it groups women into five-year bands rather than single birth years, so it isn't directly comparable to ONS's own cohort-by-cohort figures above (49% childless at 30 for the single 1989 cohort; 56% for the single 1993 cohort).3 Both readings point the same way — a sharp recent rise in childlessness at 30 — but they're built on different groupings, and this piece uses ONS's single-cohort figures as the primary numbers throughout.
A change in how many children people want is not the explanation: survey measures of ideal family size have stayed flat even as the gap between ideal and actual family size has widened to 0.7 children in the UK, among the largest gaps of any country tracked.8 Biological fecundity is also not what's being measured here — see the terminology note above.
What's not yet determinable is whether the recent fall in childlessness-by-30 will reverse. ONS is explicit that this is unresolved: recent cohorts are, in the regulator's own words, still "showing lower levels of fertility in their 20s," with the eventual outcome unknown.3
What the evidence associates with the fall, without establishing a single cause, is housing tenure, income, and — as a distinct channel from affordability — whether people have a partner at all. The Resolution Foundation's own analysis of a cohort of 32-year-olds found education, housing tenure, and relationship status together explain most of the variation in whether a woman remains childless; relationship status alone explains most of the variation for men.8 Non-graduate women in their late twenties have seen the sharpest recent rise in childlessness, alongside falling rates of coresidential partnership and a shift toward costly private renting or living with parents.8 The Resolution Foundation itself is careful to hedge this: its report says the recent decline "appears to be, at least partially, linked to financial constraints" — association, not identification, and openly described as such.8 This piece does not go further than that hedge.
Fewer births fifteen years ago is already visible in school rolls today — a mechanical lag, not a forecast. State-funded primary and nursery pupil numbers in England peaked in 2018 and have been falling in most years since: eight years of measured decline.6 Secondary numbers kept rising until 2024–25, then recorded their first actual fall in the January 2026 school census — one measured year so far.6 On primary's precedent, most of secondary's contraction hasn't happened yet.
The same cohorts working their way through schools now will, in the 2070s, be the working-age adults expected to fund an older population's pensions and healthcare — or not exist in the numbers needed to. The OBR's July 2026 Fiscal risks and sustainability report, its central 50-year scenario, projects the UK's old-age dependency ratio — the state-pension-age population relative to working-age adults — rising from around 30%, roughly steady since the 1970s, to over 40% by 2075.5 State pension spending is projected to rise from 5% of GDP to around 9%; health spending from 8% to 13%. Education spending is the one major area projected to fall, from 4.3% to 3.4% of GDP — which the OBR explicitly attributes to a falling young-age dependency ratio "due to a below-replacement birth rate in the ONS projection."5
One counter-intuitive finding from the same report is worth surfacing before this reads as a simple "more babies would fix it" story. The OBR modelled a scenario in which the birth rate rises and the death rate falls enough to stop the population shrinking naturally — TFR reaching around 1.8 by 2075, still below replacement. That scenario leaves the population nine million larger than the baseline by 2075, but government debt around 40 percentage points of GDP higher, not lower, because additional children take at least sixteen years to enter the workforce and start paying tax, while adding to spending on education and, eventually, health and pensions in the meantime.5 A higher birth rate is not, on the OBR's own modelling, a near-term fix for the fiscal pressures an ageing population creates.
This is a genuine empirical dispute, not a settled question either way, and it should be kept separate from the different, value-laden question of whether government should be trying to raise the birth rate at all — a question this piece does not attempt to adjudicate.
A systematic review of 35 quasi-experimental studies across Europe, North America and Australia since 1970 found that childcare expansions specifically increase completed fertility, and flagged newer evidence from Central Europe suggesting parental-leave expansions may have larger effects than previously thought.9
A 2025 review of family policy across low-fertility countries found "a relatively weak direct link between family policy interventions and quantum changes in fertility"; earlier reviews describe parental-leave effects on completed family size as weak, mixed, or inconsistent, even where they clearly shift the timing of births.10
The dispute doesn't map neatly onto left and right. The Centre for Social Justice, a think tank, argues explicitly for pro-natal policy on social-justice grounds, pointing to Hungary's decade of family-focused spending as a case where the TFR rose by around 30% and marriage rates doubled — though it also notes Hungary's results have been mixed and not every outcome tracks the headline TFR figure.11 Policy Exchange, a think tank generally sympathetic to family policy, was nonetheless publicly sceptical of one specific 2025 proposal — a transferable tax allowance for married couples — with a senior economics fellow there judging it unlikely to move the birth rate much even as a piece of family policy he otherwise favoured.12 Both are advocacy or policy-adjacent organisations rather than primary evidence, and are presented here only as attributed positions, not as findings.
Whether the 1992 cohort's record-low childlessness at 30 will resolve into delay or into permanently smaller families won't be measurable until its completed family size can be calculated in the early 2040s.3 ONS has not yet published final 2025 age-specific fertility rates or the general fertility rate; this piece's TFR-versus-count comparison suggests this year's fall is mostly rate-driven rather than a shrinking pool of mothers, but that can't be confirmed precisely until ONS's fuller breakdown lands later in 2026.1 The Resolution Foundation's own childlessness figures use five-year cohort bands rather than ONS's single-year cohorts, so the two shouldn't be read as directly interchangeable, even though they move the same way.38 And the OBR's own long-run projections embed an assumed future TFR of around 1.4 through to 2075 — itself uncertain in either direction, as the caveat below sets out.5
The figures behind Exhibits 02 and 04, for readers who want to check the work.
| Cohort (birth year) | Measure | Age at measurement | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1934–35 | Completed family size | 45 | 2.42 | Series peak |
| 1972–73 | Completed family size | 45 | 1.89 | Series low |
| 1979 | Completed family size | 45 | 1.95 | Latest completed cohort |
| 1940–41 | Children by 30 | 30 | 1.89 | Series peak |
| 1978 | Children by 30 | 30 | 0.98 | First trough |
| 1986 | Children by 30 | 30 | 1.02 | 1980s local peak |
| 1992 | Children by 30 | 30 | 0.80 | Latest measured, all-time low |
| — | State pension, % GDP | 2030–31 → 2075–76 | 5.0 → 9.0 | OBR baseline, projection |
| — | Health, % GDP | 2030–31 → 2075–76 | 8.0 → 13.0 | OBR baseline, projection |
| — | Education, % GDP | 2030–31 → 2075–76 | 4.3 → 3.4 | OBR baseline, projection |