World Births Peaked in 2015 and Have Fallen Every Year Since
140.2 million babies were born in 2015, the highest year on record in this series. Every year since has been lower, and 2020 fell by more than any other.
Worldwide births peaked at about 140.2 million in 2015 and have fallen every year since, with the sharpest single-year drop of 2.3 million in 2020, reaching a projected 129.2 million by 2039.
The number of babies born worldwide each year has been falling since 2015. Not the fertility rate — the actual count.
The series
| Year | Births (millions) |
|---|---|
| 2010 | 139.4 |
| 2013 | 139.5 |
| 2015 | 140.2 — peak |
| 2019 | 137.5 |
| 2020 | 135.2 (−2.3) |
| 2024 | 132.0 |
| 2025 | 132.0 |
| 2030 | 131.0 (projected) |
| 2039 | 129.2 (projected) |
From the 2015 peak to the end of the projection, a fall of about 7.8%.
Why this is a different fact from "the birth rate is falling"
These are two different numbers and they moved at different times.
The fertility rate — children per woman — has been falling for decades in most of the world. 105 of 194 countries are already below replacement.
The number of births kept rising anyway, until 2015.
The reconciliation is population momentum. Even as each woman had fewer children, the number of women of childbearing age kept growing, because they were born during a period of higher fertility. More parents having fewer children each can still produce more babies in total.
2015 is the year that stopped working. It is the point at which falling fertility finally outweighed a growing number of potential parents — a hinge that took roughly fifty years to arrive and got almost no coverage when it did.
The 2020 drop
The single largest one-year fall in the series is 2.3 million, in 2020 — more than double any other year.
The obvious explanation is the obvious one, and this dataset cannot confirm it. What the numbers do show is that the decline did not rebound afterwards: 2021 fell again, and so did 2022, 2023 and 2024. Whatever happened in 2020 did not reverse.
What follows from it
Generation Alpha contains the peak. The cohort runs 2010 to 2024, and 2015 sits in the middle of it. Whatever the largest annual birth cohort in this series is, Generation Alpha holds it, and those children are eleven years old now.
Generation Beta is being born entirely on the downslope. Every year of the 2025–2039 window is projected lower than the one before. That is the first cohort in this series for which that is true from the first year.
The planning consequence is mechanical. Anything sized to an annual birth cohort — maternity capacity, nursery places, reception intakes, first-size products — is sized to a number that has been shrinking for a decade and is projected to keep shrinking. The children who will be in reception in 2031 are already born, and there are fewer of them than the year before.
See the daily figure at how many babies are born every day, the causes at why the birth rate is falling, or a single year at /year/2015 and /year/2030.