China’s population falls again as birthrate drops 17% to record low | China

China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to another record low despite the introduction of polices aimed at encouraging people to have children.

Registered births dropped to 7.92 million in 2025 – or 5.63 for every 1,000 members of the population – down 17% from 9.54 million in 2024, and the lowest since records began in 1949.

The population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster fall than 2024, while deaths rose to 11.31 million from 10.93 million in 2024, figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed.

Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said births in 2025 were “roughly the same level as in 1738, when China’s population was only about 150 million”.

The fall comes despite years of policies from Beijing intended to boost the flagging birthrate. This year, the government allocated 90bn yuan (£9.65bn) for its first nationwide childcare subsidy programme, for children aged under three. There are also plans to expand national healthcare insurance to cover all childbirth related expenses, including IVF treatment.

But young people still feel that it is too expensive to have children, especially in a time of high unemployment and slowing economic growth. “Given the current environment, it is a miracle that anyone is willing to have kids at all,” wrote one Weibo user.

The average cost of raising a child in China until the age of 18 is 538,000 yuan – more than 6.3 times as high as its GDP per capita, compared with 4.11 times in the US or 4.26 times in Japan, according to a Chinese population research thinktank. The cost is even higher in Chinese cities.

Decades of a one-child policy mean that the current generation of adults who are at child-bearing age are socially conditioned to favour single-child households. The effects of the policy, which was lifted in 2017, mean that the pool of people of child-bearing age is also shrinking, as China’s population rapidly ages.

This year, China also removed condoms from the list of VAT-exempt items, meaning that they will be slapped with a 13% tax rate, raising concerns that the government is trying to make it harder to avoid pregnancy. Free contraceptives are still available through government-funded programmes. But many internet users in China predicted that the birthrate would continue to fall in future.

China’s death rate of 8.04 for every 1,000 members of the population in 2025 was the highest since 1968. The population has been shrinking since 2022 and is ageing rapidly, complicating Beijing’s plan to increase domestic consumption and rein in debt.

Over-60s account for about 23% of the total population, according to NBS data. By 2035, the number of people older than 60 is predicted to reach 400 million – roughly equal to the populations of the US and Italy combined – meaning hundreds of millions of people are likely to leave the workforce at a time when pension budgets are already stretched.

China has already raised retirement ages, with men now expected to work until 63 rather than 60, and women until 58 rather than 55.

Marriages in China plunged by a fifth in 2024, the steepest drop on record, with more than 6.1 million couples registering, down from 7.68 million in 2023. Marriages are typically a leading indicator for birthrates in China.

Demographers say a decision in May 2025 to allow couples to marry anywhere in the country, rather than only their place of residence, is likely to lead to a temporary increase in births.

Marriages rose 22.5% year on year to 1.61 million in the third quarter of 2025, putting China on course to halt an almost decade-long annual decline. Full data for 2025 will be released later this year.

Authorities are also trying to promote “positive views on marriage and childbearing” as they seek to counter the long-term effects of the one-child policy, which was in force from 1980 to 2015 and helped reduce poverty but reshaped Chinese society.

Population movement has compounded the demographic challenge, with large numbers of people moving from rural areas to cities, where raising children is more expensive. China’s urbanisation rate was 68% in 2025, up from about 43% in 2005.

Policymakers have made population planning a significant part of the country’s economic strategy. This year, Beijing faces potential costs of about 180bn yuan ($25.8bn/£19.3bn) to increase births, according to Reuters estimates.

Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the nationalist tabloid the Global Times, wrote on Weibo that provincial leaders should be judged on the birthrates for their regions, as well as GDP performance. “Once this indicator is included, the attention transferred from the government to society will undergo a qualitative leap,” Hu wrote.

China has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, at about one birth for every woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Other east Asian countries including Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore have similarly low levels of fertility at about 1.1 births for every woman.

China’s pool of women of reproductive age – defined by the UN as women aged from 15 to 49 – is forecast to shrink by more than two-thirds to fewer than 100 million by the end of the century.

Additional research by Lillian Yang. Reuters contributed to this report