The lowest fertility rates in the world
Macao has the lowest fertility rate of any country or area in 2023, at 0.66 children per woman, less than a third of the level that would hold a population steady. The rest of the bottom of the table is almost entirely East Asian and European.
- 0.66children per woman: Macao
- 129of 236 below replacement
- 67%of world population is below replacement
- 45%of world births happen there
The 25 lowest fertility rates, 2023
Children per woman, lowest first, from the UN World Population Prospects 2024. The crude birth rate is shown beside each one because the two do not rank countries in the same order: a country can sit near the bottom of this table and still record more births per 1,000 people than a country above it.
| # | Country or area | Children per woman | Per 1,000 | Births | Population |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Macao | 0.66 | 6.3 | 4,510 | 714K |
| 2 | Hong Kong | 0.72 | 5.6 | 41,300 | 7.44M |
| 3 | South Korea | 0.72 | 4.6 | 236,000 | 51.8M |
| 4 | Saint Barthélemy | 0.80 | 4.8 | 53 | 11.1K |
| 5 | Taiwan | 0.87 | 5.7 | 132,000 | 23.3M |
| 6 | Puerto Rico | 0.94 | 5.8 | 18,900 | 3.24M |
| 7 | Singapore | 0.94 | 8.2 | 47,500 | 5.79M |
| 8 | Ukraine | 0.98 | 5.6 | 212,000 | 37.7M |
| 9 | Holy See | 1.00 | 4.2 | 2 | 496 |
| 10 | China | 1.00 | 6.3 | 8,910,000 | 1.42B |
| 11 | British Virgin Islands | 1.05 | 8.3 | 325 | 39K |
| 12 | Curaçao | 1.07 | 7.5 | 1,390 | 185K |
| 13 | Andorra | 1.08 | 6.9 | 555 | 80.9K |
| 14 | Malta | 1.10 | 7.9 | 4,210 | 533K |
| 15 | San Marino | 1.15 | 5.9 | 200 | 33.7K |
| 16 | Chile | 1.17 | 9.0 | 176,000 | 19.7M |
| 17 | Italy | 1.20 | 6.5 | 384,000 | 59.5M |
| 18 | UAE | 1.20 | 9.8 | 104,000 | 10.6M |
| 19 | Lithuania | 1.20 | 7.5 | 21,400 | 2.85M |
| 20 | Japan | 1.21 | 6.0 | 750,000 | 124M |
| 21 | Belarus | 1.21 | 7.1 | 65,100 | 9.12M |
| 22 | Thailand | 1.21 | 8.2 | 591,000 | 71.7M |
| 23 | Spain | 1.21 | 7.0 | 337,000 | 47.9M |
| 24 | Mauritius | 1.24 | 9.3 | 11,800 | 1.27M |
| 25 | St Pierre & Miquelon | 1.27 | 5.2 | 30 | 5.68K |
Where the bottom of the table is
Two regions dominate it. East Asia supplies the very lowest figures. Macao, along with several of its neighbours, sits below 1 child per woman, a level with almost no historical precedent outside wartime. Southern and Eastern Europe supply most of the rest, clustered between 1.2 and 1.5.
Several entries near the bottom are small territories and city states, where nearly the whole population is urban and where people frequently move in and out for work. Their figures are real, but a city is not a country, and comparing a financial centre with a nation of a hundred million is comparing two different things.
Why fertility fell this far
The countries at the bottom of the table share features rather than a single cause: late marriage and late first births, long and competitive education, expensive urban housing, and long working hours that are hard to combine with a second child. Surveys in several of them find people saying they want more children than they have. The general explanations for falling fertility apply here in their sharpest form.
What follows from it
Sustained fertility this far below replacement means each generation is roughly half the size of the one before it, and that shows up first in the number of births and only later in the size of the population. South Korea recorded 784.8 thousand births in 1950 and 236.5 thousand in 2023, against a population that is considerably larger than it was then.
The lag is population momentum, and it runs both ways: a country below replacement keeps growing for a while, and a country that returns to replacement keeps shrinking for a while. Migration can offset the arithmetic entirely, and this dataset does not separate it out: the population series it uses is total population change, migration included.