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Germany’s birth rate has fallen to its lowest level since 1946, as the country struggles with the challenges of an ageing population.
This was revealed in official data released on Tuesday. According to the German statistics agency, Destatis, there were around 654,300 births in 2025, compared with 677,117 the previous year, a drop of around 3.4 per cent.
It was the fourth year in a row that the number of births had fallen. The number of deaths around 1.01 million exceeded the number of births in 2025 by 352,000, the largest birth deficit in the post-war period, the agency said.
According to Destatis, the trend is largely due to two developments: the relatively small number of people born in the 1990s now reaching the age when they are most likely to have children, and the decline in the total fertility rate since 2022. The total fertility rate measures the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime.
In 2024, the latest year for which statistics are available, around 19 million people in Germany were aged 65 or older, about 23% of the total population.
Only 15% of Germany’s population was over 65 in 1991. A government-appointed pensions commission is due to present its reform recommendations on June 30, 2026. Chancellor Friedrich Merz faced backlash last week after suggesting that the state pension should be viewed as a “basic provision” to be supplemented by other sources of income.
Unions and the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governs in coalition with Merz’s conservatives, criticised the remarks. Merz later clarified that there would be “no cuts to statutory pensions” under the current government.
