The number of births in the US increased slightly in 2024 to roughly 3.6 million, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The small increase of 1% in the number of births comes amid a long-term decline that began during the Great Recession, in about 2008. The provisional data was released on Wednesday.
However, at least one demographer warned against drawing any conclusions about a trend from the data – noting that growing US families face sustained challenges in economic uncertainty, housing and childcare costs.
“There continues to be very fundamental transformations of fertility and the family in the US,” said Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociologist and professor who studies family demographics at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the US, economic uncertainty, the cost of housing and childcare, and changes in how important people feel it is to have children have contributed to a decline in fertility “that is shared among various high-income countries, and I would expect that to continue”, Kohler added.
The report showed a record-low number of teenage girls and young women gave birth, while the number of women aged 40-44 who gave birth increased – a trend that has continued almost uninterrupted since 1985. The number of births appears to be buoyed by Hispanic and Asian women, whose birth rates increased.
The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics examines data based on nearly all births registered in 2024. The report builds on provisional data released in March.
The slight year-over-year increase in births appears largely to be attributable to Hispanic and Asian mothers, for whom the number of births rose 4% and 5% respectively. The number of births declined 4% for Black women, 3% for American Indian and Alaska Native women, and less than 1% for white women. Births were essentially unchanged for Native Hawaiian and Pacific islander women.
The CDC report did not address the reasons Americans choose to have children. However, growing US families face a bevy of challenges.
The US is in the midst of a childcare crisis, with a shortage of workers, high cost and long wait lists for young children. Still, the Trump administration has proposed slashing education for even the nation’s neediest children, by eliminating Head Start funding entirely. Relative to peer developed democracies, the US government already invests very little in early childhood education.
Even so, the Trump administration is reportedly weighing options to push more married heterosexual couples to have babies, an idea supported by close advisers such as JD Vance, the vice-president, Elon Musk and the “pro-natalist” movement.
Kohler said he doubted relatively modest proposals would change the fertility rate.
“If one indeed wanted to make a profound stabilization or fertility incline one would have to do something very significant,” he said.
Challenges families face, he said, “are just of a different order of magnitude than the policies being discussed by the current administration”.
The report also did not address the impact of abortion bans on birth rates. The supreme court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022. Since then, a dozen states have enacted total abortion bans, mostly in the south and midwest.
There is some research to suggest that birth rates and infant mortality in states with bans has increased more than expected, even as tens of thousands of women travel across state lines in an effort to terminate pregnancies.
