About 3.6 million babies were born in the US in 2024, according to a new report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fertility rate last year – 54.6 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age – increased less than 1% from the record low in 2023, hovering well below rates from years earlier.
The US fertility rate has been trending down for decades, with a particularly steep dip after the Great Recession of 2008. An uptick in 2021 spurred theories about a Covid-19 “baby bump,” but the rate quickly returned to its more consistent downward pattern.
Experts say that year-to-year movement in the fertility rate tends to be incremental and that a single year of change – such as this year’s slight increase – does not indicate a shift in the long-term trend.
But the latest provisional data, published Wednesday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, also shows that births continue to shift to older mothers. The fertility rate was highest among women in their early 30s in 2024, with more than 95 births for every 1,000 women ages 30 to 34.