Federal Statistical Office of Germany

17 July 2024 Fertility rate down to 1.35 children per woman in 2023

692,989 babies were born in Germany in 2023. This represented a drop of 45,830, or 6%, compared with 2022 (738,819 newborns). 2013 was the last year in which fewer children (682,069) were born in Germany than in 2023. The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) also reports that the total fertility rate, often referred to as birth rate, fell by 7% from 1.46 to 1.35 children per woman in 2023 from a year earlier. In 2022, fertility had already been down 8% compared with the previous year. The last two years therefore saw a marked acceleration of the decline in the number of children per woman, which has been observed since 2017 and was only interrupted in 2021 in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the years from 2011 to 2016, the fertility rate rose from 1.39 to 1.59 due to better framework conditions for families with children and immigration. The provisional birth rates for the first four months of 2024 show a further, but significantly smaller decline of 3% compared with the same period a year earlier.

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