Italy's fertility rate falls to 80-year low: report

ITALY – Births in Italy fell last year by nearly 4 per cent, with its fertility rate dropping to a historic low not seen since 1945, due to economic pressures and lack of help for working mothers, a report published Tuesday found.

With 355,000 babies born in 2025, the fertility rate, or the average number of children per woman, dropped to 1.14, according to the report by the Birthrate Foundation together with Italy’s National Institute of Statistics (Istat).

Italy would need a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman to maintain a stable population without immigration, the report found.

“The desire for motherhood and fatherhood is still present, but it often clashes with job insecurity, high costs, incompatible lifestyles and inadequate services,” the report said.

Istat calculated that had all the women who said in 2024 they wanted to have children within the next three years actually done so, Italy would have recorded about 760,000 births annually – more than double the number born last year.

Many respondents said they feared that having a child would worsen their financial situation and impact their careers – a concern voiced particularly by women.

“When family support services are lacking, it is women who fill the void: they stop working not by choice, but out of necessity,” wrote the report.

In March, Istat noted that despite the decline in births, the number of residents in Italy remained stable in 2025, at 58.9 million people.

The arrival of 440,000 immigrants helped “offset Italy’s negative natural population balance, caused by fewer births than deaths, and its ageing population,” it said. AFP