Births in the United States dropped in 2025, according to newly published data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Approximately 3.6 million births were recorded in 2025, according to the CDC. In 2024, officials logged 3.62 million births.
The new data, published in early February, are provisional and subject to change.
Data is still being compiled and analyzed, but the final tally might add only “a few thousand additional births,” said Robert Anderson, a statistician who oversees birth and death tracking at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
Births in the United States have been falling since the peak of 4.31 million births in 2007. They went up slightly in 2021 and 2022 before decreasing to just under 3.6 million in 2023.
So far, only the number of births is available for 2025, and not birth rates and other information that can provide insight.
For example, although births increased in 2024 over the year before, the fertility rate actually fell, University of North Carolina family demographer Karen Guzzo said.
The fertility rate is a statistic describing whether each generation has enough children to replace itself, about 2.1 children per woman. It has been sliding in the United States for close to two decades as more women wait longer to have children or don’t have children at all.
In 2024, 85 percent of women aged 20 to 24, 63 percent of women aged 25 to 29, 40 percent of women aged 30 to 34, and 23 percent of women aged 35 to 39 did not have children, according to U.S. Census data.
Speculating about 2025 data, Guzzo said in an email, “I wouldn’t expect birth or fertility rates to have risen; I would expect them to fall because childbearing is highly related to economic conditions and uncertainty.”
President Donald Trump and lawmakers have lamented falling births and introduced or enacted several measures that they say will help counteract the trend.
A Trump-signed bill gives children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, taxpayer-funded $1,000 investment accounts. Beneficiaries cannot access the money until they become adults.
Trump also signed an order in 2025 that helps people pay for in vitro fertilization, which people struggling with fertility sometimes utilize.
“My Administration recognizes the importance of family formation, and as a Nation, our public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children,” he wrote in that order.
Democrats have criticized the measures and said Republicans should approve paid family leave, subsidized child care, and other steps that they say have been proven to improve the lives of women and families.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.