According to newly posted provisional data, U.S. births declined slightly in 2025.
Just over 3.6 million births have been reported via birth certificates, approximately 24,000 less than in 2024. This decline appears to confirm the predictions of some experts who were skeptical that a 22,250-birth increase marked the beginning of an upward trend.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its provisional birth data late last week, filling in two months of missing data and providing the first comprehensive look at last year’s count.
According to the CDC, the posted numbers account for nearly all of the babies born in 2025. Data is still being compiled and analyzed, but the final count may only add “a few thousand additional births,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees birth and death tracking at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Experts state that people are marrying later and are also concerned about their ability to have the funds, health insurance, and other resources required to raise children in a stable environment.
Last year, the Trump administration took measures to encourage more births, such as issuing something intended to expand access to and reduce the costs of in vitro fertilization and supporting the idea of something that might encourage more couples to have children.
So far, only the number of births is available, and not birth rates and other information that can provide insights into who is having babies.
For instance, although births increased in 2024 compared to the previous year, as noted by Karen Guzzo, a family demographer at the University of North Carolina.
The fertility rate is a statistic that indicates whether each generation has enough children to replace itself, about 2.1 kids per woman. It has been declining in America for nearly two decades as more women delay having children or do not have kids at all.
Regarding 2025, “I wouldn’t expect birth or fertility rates to have risen; I would expect them to fall because childbearing is highly correlated with economic conditions and uncertainty,” Guzzo said in an email.
She also added that most of the births in 2025 would have been children conceived in 2024, when people were worried about affordability and political polarization.
As a general trend, U.S. births and birth rates have been decreasing for years. They dropped in