Hungary spent over a decade building what it calls one of the most family-friendly policy regimes in the world, including baby grants worth roughly five years’ minimum wage, forgivable loans tied to the number of children, and, starting January 1, 2026, lifetime income-tax exemption for mothers of two or more children. Births still fell to a record low of 77,500 in 2024, down 9.1 percent from the previous year, with the national fertility rate dropping for a third consecutive year to below 1.4, well under the 2.1 replacement threshold. Hungary is not a story of policy failure alone; it is the clearest illustration available anywhere of how difficult, and how expensive, reversing sustained low fertility has proven to be, even for a government willing to spend heavily and consistently on the problem.
That difficulty sits at the center of what has become one of the defining demographic stories of the 21st century: fertility falling below the level needed to replace the population in a widening share of the world, with no country that has fallen substantially below replacement having yet achieved a full, sustained recovery.
What Is Low Fertility?
Demographers distinguish several tiers within the broad category of “low fertility.” Below-replacement fertility describes any total fertility rate (TFR) under approximately 2.1 births per woman in low-mortality countries, the threshold at which a population, in the long run and absent migration, exactly replaces itself.
Very low fertility is typically used for rates below 1.5, a level associated with more rapid population ageing and, eventually, population decline. “Lowest-low fertility,” a term coined by demographers in the early 2000s, describes rates below 1.3, a threshold that South Korea, Hong Kong, Macau and several Eastern European countries have fallen well beneath.
It is important to remember that TFR is a period measure, calculated from a single year’s age-specific birth rates; it can shift sharply based on the timing of births alone, even when the number of children women ultimately have over their lifetimes changes less dramatically.
How Low Has Global Fertility Fallen?
Global fertility fell from around 5 births per woman in the 1950s and 1960s to approximately 2.5 in 2010-2015, and to 2.2 by 2023-2024, according to UN and World Bank-based estimates. That decline has continued almost without interruption for seven decades and shows no clear sign of reversing at the global level.
Global Fertility Decline, Long View
| Period | Approx. Global TFR |
|---|---|
| 1950s-1960s | ~5.0 |
| 1990 | ~3.3 |
| 2010-2015 | ~2.5 |
| 2023-2024 | ~2.2 |
| 2050 (UN projection) | ~2.1 |
| 2100 (UN projection, medium variant) | ~1.8 |
Source: United Nations World Fertility 2024; UN PopFacts 2017/3; World Bank-based compilations.
Which Countries Have the Lowest Fertility?
South Korea holds the record for the lowest sustained national fertility rate ever documented, with recent estimates ranging from 0.68 to 0.78 births per woman, the only OECD member to fall below 1.0. Hong Kong, Macau and Puerto Rico are among the very few other places in the world with fertility below 1, according to World Bank data.
Beyond this extreme low tier, a broad band of countries across East Asia, Southern and Eastern Europe cluster between roughly 1.0 and 1.5: Italy (1.24), Japan (1.26-1.34), and a widening set of Eastern European nations, several of which UN 2022 projection-based analysis suggests could fall below 1.0 births per woman by 2100, including Ukraine, Serbia, North Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Countries With the Lowest Fertility Rates, Selected
| Country/Territory | Total Fertility Rate | Category |
|---|---|---|
| South Korea | 0.68-0.78 | Lowest globally |
| Hong Kong | below 1.0 | Lowest-low |
| Macau | below 1.0 | Lowest-low |
| Japan | 1.26-1.34 | Very low, sustained since 1970s |
| Italy | 1.24 | Very low |
| Hungary | below 1.4 (2024) | Very low, falling despite policy |
| United States | 1.64 | Below replacement |
| United Kingdom | 1.56 | Below replacement |
Source: Statistics Korea; World Bank; Statista/Cambridge University Press compilations; Bloomberg reporting on Hungarian Central Statistical Office data, 2024.
Why Fertility Falls Below Replacement
Later Marriage and Parenthood
Across virtually every country that has fallen below replacement, average age at first marriage and first childbirth has risen substantially, compressing the biological and socially sanctioned window available for childbearing.
Education and Employment
Rising female educational attainment and workforce participation are among the most consistently documented correlates of fertility decline across countries and time periods, as career establishment increasingly competes with the years traditionally used for family formation.
Housing and Cost of Raising Children
In numerous higher-income countries, the cost of housing large enough for a family, combined with childcare costs, is frequently cited by prospective parents as a constraint on family size, though isolating its precise statistical contribution from other economic factors remains methodologically difficult across studies.
Economic Uncertainty
Unstable employment conditions for young adults are commonly associated with delayed and reduced childbearing in developed-economy research, particularly in labor markets where job security has weakened relative to previous generations.
Contraception and Reproductive Choice
Wider availability of effective contraception has converted family size from something largely determined by biology into something more deliberately chosen, a shift foundational to the entire global fertility transition.
Changing Family Preferences
Surveyed fertility intentions have themselves declined in many countries over recent decades, suggesting genuine shifts in preferences, not solely external constraints, contribute to the pattern.
The Gap Between Desired and Achieved Fertility
This is among the most consequential and least publicized findings in modern fertility research. In numerous low-fertility countries, survey respondents report wanting more children, on average, than they ultimately have, a gap researchers attribute to some combination of economic constraint, work-family conflict, and delayed partnership formation rather than a straightforward decline in the desire for children.
No single explanation applies uniformly across every low-fertility country; the same broad set of factors combines in different proportions and interacts with distinct local institutions, labor markets and cultural expectations in each case.
Why Some Countries Have Extremely Low Fertility
South Korea’s position at the very bottom of the global ranking reflects a particularly intense combination of factors layered on top of the drivers found elsewhere: extremely competitive education and labor markets, very high housing costs concentrated in Seoul, long working hours, and a documented cultural expectation that marriage precede childbearing, at a time when marriage itself is becoming less common and occurring later. Hungary’s case, examined in detail below, illustrates that even sustained, well-funded policy intervention has not been sufficient to overcome these combined pressures.
The Hungary Case Study: Does Family Policy Work?
Hungary offers the most closely studied real-world test case for whether aggressive pronatalist policy can meaningfully reverse low fertility. Under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Hungary built one of the most generous family policy regimes among comparable countries, including baby grants, forgivable childbearing loans, housing subsidies and, from 2026, lifetime income tax exemption for mothers of two or more children.
Academic research on the policy’s effects has found genuine but limited impact: one Bayesian analysis of comparable OECD countries found a positive statistical relationship between cash and service family benefits and fertility rates, and estimated that if Japan, a similarly low-fertility country, adopted Hungary-level cash benefit spending (around 1.5 percent of GDP), its probability of reversing fertility decline by 2030 would rise from just 12 percent under current policy to over 69 percent.
Yet Hungary’s own recent trajectory complicates any simple pronatalist success narrative. Despite the sustained policy investment, Hungarian births fell to a record low of 77,500 in 2024, a 9.1 percent decline from the prior year, and the national fertility rate fell for a third consecutive year to below 1.4.
Independent demographic analysis has found that Hungary’s fertility increase in earlier years of the program was smaller than the increases recorded in several neighboring countries that did not adopt comparably aggressive policies, raising questions about how much of any earlier improvement was attributable to the policy itself versus broader regional trends.
Hungary’s population has been declining since peaking at 10.7 million in 1980, the longest continuous population decline recorded anywhere in Europe, compounded by strong emigration and weak immigration alongside its low birth rate.
The broader academic literature on family policy effectiveness across OECD countries reaches a similarly qualified conclusion: cash and service benefits show a measurable positive association with fertility, but the relationship is neither large nor guaranteed, and no country that has fallen substantially below replacement level has yet achieved a full, sustained return to 2.1 or above.
Does Low Fertility Automatically Mean Population Decline?
Not immediately, and this is a critical qualification often missing from popular coverage of the topic. Demographic momentum, the tendency for a young population to keep producing significant numbers of births for years after fertility per woman falls, because there are simply more women in their childbearing years even at a lower rate each, can sustain population growth for a considerable period after fertility first crosses below replacement.
Migration operates independently as a second major factor: countries with sustained below-replacement fertility, including much of Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States, have continued to grow in population because immigration has more than offset the shortfall in births relative to deaths.
The Link Between Low Fertility and Population Ageing
Population ageing follows from sustained low fertility with far more certainty than population decline does. As successive birth cohorts shrink relative to the existing population, the average age of a country’s population rises steadily, increasing the share of older, typically retired, people relative to the working-age population that supports them through taxation and labor.
This process is already well advanced in Japan, South Korea and much of Europe, and is beginning in China, whose own below-replacement fertility, combined with the demographic legacy of its former one-child policy, is projected to produce a substantial and rapid population decline over coming decades.
How Low Fertility Changes Labour Markets and Economies
A shrinking working-age population relative to a growing retired population strains pension systems designed around a very different demographic balance, and can constrain labor supply in ways that affect economic growth, though the precise economic consequences are debated and depend heavily on offsetting factors such as automation, productivity growth and immigration policy.
Countries facing this transition earliest, again Japan and South Korea prominently, have already begun experimenting with policy responses ranging from raising retirement ages to actively recruiting immigrant labor, alongside continued, if only partially effective, efforts to raise fertility directly.
Can Countries Reverse Low Fertility?
The honest answer, based on the available evidence, is: not easily, and not yet at scale. Family policies aimed at reducing the cost of childcare, improving parental leave and supporting housing affordability for families have shown modest, measurable, positive effects in rigorous cross-country studies, but the magnitude has generally been insufficient to return any country with deeply entrenched low fertility back to replacement level.
Hungary’s experience, despite genuinely substantial fiscal commitment, standing at record-low births in 2024 after over a decade of aggressive policy, is the clearest illustration that policy alone, absent broader shifts in housing costs, labor market structure, gender norms and cultural expectations around parenthood, faces real limits.
That said, the documented gap between desired and achieved fertility in many low-fertility countries suggests genuine latent demand for larger families exists in principle, meaning policy that successfully addresses the specific constraints preventing people from having the number of children they say they want, rather than policy aimed at increasing desired family size itself, may hold more promise than the results to date might suggest.
What Global Fertility Could Look Like by 2050 and 2100
UN projections put global fertility at approximately 2.1, essentially at replacement level, by around 2050, before continuing to decline to roughly 1.8 births per woman by 2100 under the medium-variant scenario. This trajectory implies that global population growth, driven overwhelmingly by the remaining high-fertility countries concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, will continue for decades even as an increasing majority of the world’s individual countries fall below replacement level, with the UN’s own 2022-based projections putting the global population peak at around 10.4 billion in the 2080s, followed by a long-term decline.
Why the Low Fertility Story Is Not the Same Everywhere
It is important to resist collapsing this entire topic into a single global narrative. Sub-Saharan Africa remains firmly outside the low fertility pattern, with several countries still recording fertility rates above 6 births per woman as of recent estimates, a demographic profile fundamentally different from that of South Korea, Italy or Hungary.
Even within the low fertility world, meaningful differences persist: some countries, including France and Sweden, have sustained fertility rates modestly closer to replacement than their peers, generally attributed to comparatively strong, longstanding family policy infrastructure, while others, including South Korea and much of Eastern Europe, have fallen to levels with no clear historical precedent for a large national population.
Treating “low fertility” as a single undifferentiated global crisis obscures both the genuine severity of the pattern in its most extreme cases and the considerable variation in how different societies have managed the underlying transition.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is considered low fertility?
Below-replacement fertility generally refers to a total fertility rate under approximately 2.1 births per woman, with “very low fertility” typically used for rates below 1.5 and “lowest-low fertility” for rates below 1.3, thresholds used by demographers to distinguish increasingly severe stages of decline.
2. Which country has the lowest fertility rate?
South Korea, with recent estimates ranging from 0.68 to 0.78 births per woman, the lowest sustained national rate ever recorded, ahead of Hong Kong and Macau, which are also below 1.0.
3. Why are fertility rates falling?
A combination of later marriage and parenthood, rising education and employment for women, high housing and childcare costs, economic uncertainty, wider contraceptive access and changing family size preferences, interacting differently across countries rather than any single universal cause.
4. Does below-replacement fertility mean population decline?
Not immediately. Demographic momentum from a country’s existing young population, along with continued immigration, can sustain population growth for years or decades after fertility first falls below replacement level.
5. Can governments increase fertility rates?
Family policies such as childcare subsidies, parental leave and housing support show modest, measurable positive effects in cross-country research, but Hungary’s experience, with births hitting a record low in 2024 despite over a decade of some of the most generous family policy spending in the world, illustrates the real limits of policy alone.
6. What happens when a country has very low fertility for decades?
Population ageing follows with near certainty, as successive smaller birth cohorts shrink the working-age population relative to the retired population, eventually leading to population decline in the absence of sufficient offsetting immigration, a pattern already advanced in Japan and parts of Eastern Europe.
7. Is the global population already shrinking?
No. UN 2022-based projections put the world population peak at around 10.4 billion in the 2080s, with continued growth until then driven primarily by still-high-fertility countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, even as an increasing majority of individual countries have already fallen below replacement fertility.
8. Why did Hungary’s fertility rate keep falling despite generous family policy?
Independent analysis attributes part of the shortfall to the limits of cash and housing incentives against deeper structural pressures, including labor market instability and housing costs, while noting that Hungary’s earlier fertility gains were smaller than those recorded in some neighboring countries without comparably aggressive policy, raising questions about how much of any earlier improvement was policy-driven.
9. What is the difference between period and cohort fertility?
Period fertility, the standard total fertility rate, is calculated from a single year’s birth rates and can shift sharply due to changes in the timing of births alone. Cohort or completed fertility measures the actual lifetime number of children born to a specific group of women, providing a more stable long-run picture of family size.
10. Which regions remain furthest from the low fertility pattern?
Sub-Saharan Africa, where several countries continue to record fertility rates above 6 births per woman, remains the clearest exception to the global low fertility trend, alongside parts of the Middle East and South Asia still completing their fertility transitions.
Sources
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Fertility 2024
- United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, PopFacts 2017/3
- World Bank, Total Fertility Rate data compilations
- Statistics Korea, national fertility rate releases, 2021-2025
- Bloomberg, “Hungary Births Drop to Record in Blow to Orban’s Family Policies,” 2025 reporting on Hungarian Central Statistical Office data
- PMC/National Institutes of Health, “Reversing fertility decline in Japan with foreign pro-natalist policies, 1990-2035,” systematic review and Bayesian analysis
- PMC/National Institutes of Health, “Key issues in the effectiveness of public financial tools to support childbearing,” Hungary case study
- Cambridge University Press, “Demography and the Making of the Modern World,” 2024
- Euronews, coverage of UN World Population Prospects 2022-based European fertility projections to 2100
