According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Monday (January 19), China’s population declined for the fourth consecutive year, with the birth rate falling to a record low in 2025. The country’s population fell by 3.39 million to reach around 1.4 billion by the end of 2025, marking a faster decline than the previous year.
Deepening the country’s demographic crisis, government figures show the birth rate dropped to 5.63 per 1,000 people in 2025 which is the lowest level recorded since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. At the same time, the death rate rose to 8.04 per 1,000 people, the highest recorded since 1968.
Between 2024 and 2025, the number of births declined by 17 per cent, falling from 9.54 million to 7.92 million, according to NBS data. China now has one of the lowest fertility rates globally, at around one birth per woman, far below the replacement level of 2.1.
Ageing population and Economic strain
The demographic slowdown is being compounded by rapid ageing and a shrinking workforce.
NBS data showed that people aged 60 and above now make up about 23 per cent of China’s total population. Meanwhile, the core working-age group continues to contract. People aged 16 to 59 accounted for 60.6 per cent of the population in 2025, down from 60.9 per cent a year earlier. The number of people in this age group fell by about 6.62 million year-on-year.
With many young people moving away from their parents, a growing number of elderly citizens are left to care for themselves or rely on state support, even as pressure mounts on China’s pension system.
The continued fall in births is largely due to rising living costs and uncertainty in the job market. As the economy slows, many households are under financial pressure, making young couples hesitant to have children, even with government incentives in place.
China is also among the most expensive countries in which to raise a child. A 2024 report by the YuWa Population Research Institute in Beijing estimated that the average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 is 538,000 yuan , more than 6.3 times China’s GDP per capita. This compares with 4.11 times in the United States and 4.26 times in Japan.
China’s Active Measures
In recent years, Beijing has rolled out several measures to boost births and balance the overall population. In 2021, authorities allowed couples to have up to three children. Last May, couples were permitted to marry anywhere in China, rather than only in their place of residence.
From July 2025, parents were offered 3,600 yuan a year for each child under the age of three under the country’s first nationwide child subsidy scheme. The total potential cost of these measures is around 180 billion yuan.
The government has also pledged that from 2026, pregnant women will not be “out of pocket,” with all medical costs, including in vitro fertilisation, fully covered. Fees for public kindergartens were waived from last autumn.
Some policies have also sparked controversy. From January this year , a new 13 per cent tax on contraceptives, including condoms and birth control pills was announced. The move has raised concerns about unwanted pregnancies and rising HIV rates.
Despite these efforts, births continue to fall, highlighting the limits of policy interventions in reversing deep-rooted demographic and social trends.
In a report by ABC, according to Xiujian Peng, senior research fellow at the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University, these policies may slow the decline but cannot reverse the overall trend.
“Even if China’s government could reverse the fertility decline immediately and increase its total fertility rate to a replacement level of 2.1, it will still take around 70 years for China’s population to increase again.”
United Nations projections echo this assessment. The UN estimates that China will experience the largest absolute population loss between 2024 and 2054, at about 204 million people. “By 2100, China is projected to have lost more than half of its current population and to have returned to a population size comparable to that recorded in the late 1950s,” reads the UN report.
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