Babies born in 2025 fall below 30,000 for the first time since Singapore’s independence

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SINGAPORE – The number of babies born in 2025 fell to the lowest since Singapore’s independence, with fewer than 30,000 births for the first time since 1965.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths continues to rise in a rapidly ageing society, with the twin demographic challenges of falling births and rising deaths posing what the Government has described as an existential challenge.

A total of 29,864 babies were born in 2025, 11.4 per cent fewer than the 33,703 births in 2024, according to the Report on Registration of Births and Deaths 2025. The report was released by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) on July 27.

Checks by The Straits Times found that 2025 was the first year in which the annual number of births fell below 30,000 since 1965, when 55,725 babies were born.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the annual number of births ranged from more than 40,000 to over 50,000 in most years. In the past two decades, annual births have fallen below 40,000 in most years.

In 2025, 87 per cent, or 26,071, of all babies born had at least one parent who is a Singaporean.

With people marrying at a later age, the median age of first-time mothers has continued to rise, which adds to Singapore’s fertility challenge as a woman’s fertility declines with age.

The median age of first-time mothers increased from 31.3 years in 2021 to 32.1 years in 2025.

In terms of educational attainment, about two in three first-time mothers in 2025 had university degrees, while about one in five had A Levels, a diploma, Institute of Technical Education qualifications or equivalent.

Only about one in 10 first-time mothers have O-level or lower educational qualifications.

The ICA report comes about five months after Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong said in February that the resident total fertility rate (TFR) fell to a new low of 0.87 in 2025. The TFR refers to the average number of babies each woman would have during her reproductive years.

With birth rates falling at an unprecedented pace, Singapore’s citizen population may start to shrink by the early 2040s without new interventions, Gan said.

While the Government’s top priority is to continue supporting Singaporeans in forming families, he also stressed the need to have a “carefully managed immigration flow to augment our low birth rate”.

Experts have attributed Singapore’s persistent baby woes to more Singaporeans remaining single, and married couples having fewer or no children.

To tackle these issues, an inter-agency workgroup called the Marriage and Parenthood Reset Workgroup was formed earlier in 2026 to find ways to better support Singaporeans in marrying and having children.

However, the latest demographic data is not all bleak as the number of teenage mothers and single-parent birth registrations fell significantly. Single-parent birth registrations refer to babies whose births were registered without the father’s name.

Only 140 babies were born to teenagers aged 19 and younger in 2025, a 43 per cent fall from the 244 births recorded in 2024.

Some 258 babies were registered without the father’s name in 2025, 22 per cent fewer than the 330 babies in 2024. Only 17 per cent of these babies in 2025 were born to teens aged 19 and under.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths rose by 0.2 per cent from 26,442 in 2024 to 26,499 in 2025.

In 2025, the two major causes of deaths were cancer as well as heart and hypertensive diseases, which accounted for slightly over half of all deaths here.

The report said that “unnatural deaths”, such as accidents, suicides and other “external causes”, made up only 2 per cent of all deaths.

Most of those who died were elderly, with 87 per cent of them aged 60 and older.

The median age of those who died was 78.2 years old in 2025, up from 76.1 years in 2016.