Babies born on January 1, 2025, entered the world as the first confirmed members of a cohort that, by one demographer’s estimate, will make up 16 percent of the global population within a decade. That cohort has been named Generation Beta, and its proposed span, 2025 to 2039, will eventually cover roughly 2 billion births at current global fertility levels. Before examining what makes this generation distinct, it is worth stating plainly what Generation Beta is not: it is not a category tracked by the United Nations, the U.S. Census Bureau, or any national statistics office. It is a marketing and social research label, and that distinction matters before any statistic gets attached to the name.
What Is Generation Beta?
Generation Beta was coined by Mark McCrindle, the Australian social researcher and futurist who also named Generation Alpha. McCrindle defines Generation Beta as people born between 2025 and 2039, succeeding Generation Alpha, which he places at 2010 to 2024. Some organizations use slightly different boundaries. A World Economic Forum article placed the range at 2025 to 2038, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Generation Alpha definition of 2013 to 2025 would push Beta’s start to 2026. These small discrepancies matter less than the underlying point: there is no single authoritative body that ratifies where one generation ends and the next begins.
The Beta name follows the same logic as Alpha. Alpha marked the first generation named with a Greek letter rather than a cultural reference, largely because researchers had exhausted alphabetic naming with Generation Z. Beta continues that sequence. McCrindle has also framed Beta in technological terms, describing it as akin to a software update, “the new and improved version,” a framing that ties neatly into the cohort’s expected relationship with artificial intelligence.
Generation Beta children will be born primarily to parents who are late Millennials and older Gen Z, roughly those born in the late 1980s through the mid-2000s. Because life expectancy keeps rising in most countries, McCrindle projects many members of Generation Beta will live to see the 22nd century. A baby born in 2025 turns 76 in the year 2101, a routine retirement age in much of the world today.
The most important caveat belongs at the top of any serious treatment of this topic: Generation Beta is a proposed cultural cohort, not a demographic unit with fixed, agreed statistical boundaries. Pew Research Center, one of the most cited authorities on generational analysis, stopped assigning new birth cohorts to formal generational labels in 2023, citing concerns that fixed cutoffs oversimplify complex social change. Any statistic attributed to “Generation Beta” should therefore be understood as an estimate built from official birth and population data, filtered through an informal cohort definition that is not universally accepted.
Why Generation Beta Is Being Linked to the AI Era
Every generational label eventually gets tied to a defining technology: television for Boomers, the early internet for Millennials, smartphones and social media for Gen Z, tablets for Generation Alpha. Generation Beta’s defining condition is expected to be artificial intelligence embedded so deeply into daily infrastructure that it becomes invisible rather than novel.
Several strands of this environment are already measurable rather than speculative:
Education
AI-driven adaptive learning tools are already used in a meaningful share of primary and secondary classrooms in wealthier countries, and adoption is accelerating in curricula across Asia, Europe, and North America. Generation Beta children will be the first cohort for whom this is simply how school has always worked, rather than a pandemic-era or post-pandemic experiment.
Healthcare
AI-assisted diagnostics, wearable health monitoring, and algorithmic triage are moving from pilot programs into routine clinical use. A child born in 2025 is likely to have health data tracked by machine-assisted systems from infancy.
Automation and daily life
McCrindle has predicted that Generation Beta will be the first cohort to experience autonomous transportation at meaningful scale, along with wearable technology and immersive digital environments as ordinary features of childhood rather than novelties.
Parental gatekeeping
One counterintuitive finding from McCrindle’s research is that Generation Beta’s parents, who are largely Gen Z, appear more cautious about screen exposure than the Millennial parents of Generation Alpha were. McCrindle’s surveys found 36 percent of Gen Z parents strongly agreed that children’s screen time should be limited, compared with 30 percent of Millennial parents. That single data point complicates any assumption that each successive generation will simply be granted more unsupervised technology exposure than the one before it.
It is worth stressing that AI exposure will not be uniform. A child born in 2025 in a country with limited digital infrastructure and one born the same year in Seoul or San Francisco will experience entirely different technological childhoods. Environmental description is not equivalent to universal experience.
The Demographic World Generation Beta Is Entering
Generation Beta’s technological environment is only half the story. The other half is a demographic transition already well underway by 2025, and it is more consequential for population structure than any single piece of technology.
Global fertility has fallen from roughly 5 births per woman in the 1960s to about 2.2 in 2024, according to United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs data, edging close to the replacement threshold of 2.1. More than half of the world’s countries and areas now sit below replacement fertility. This decline did not happen evenly. It has been steepest in East Asia and parts of Europe, and much slower in Sub-Saharan Africa, producing a demographic map that looks less like a single global trend and more like two or three separate worlds occupying the same planet.
The World Population Prospects 2024 revision, the UN’s most authoritative population dataset, put the global population at 8.2 billion in 2024, projected to rise to around 10.3 billion by the mid-2080s before gradually declining to about 10.2 billion by 2100. As of 2024, population size has already peaked in 63 countries and areas, including China, Germany, Japan, and Russia. Another 48 countries, including Brazil, Iran, and Vietnam, are expected to peak between 2025 and 2054, meaning much of Generation Beta will be born into countries that are already shrinking or about to start shrinking.
At the other extreme, in nine countries including Niger, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the UN projects population will double between 2024 and 2054, driven by fertility rates still well above four children per woman. Generation Beta, more than any cohort before it, will be defined by which side of that divide a given child is born on.
Global Fertility Decline, Selected Years
| Period | Global Fertility Rate (births per woman) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1963-1965 | approx. 5.0 | UN DESA historical estimates |
| 1990 | approx. 3.4 | UN DESA historical estimates |
| 2010 | approx. 2.6 | UN DESA historical estimates |
| 2024 | approx. 2.2 | UN World Fertility 2024 |
The UN also estimates roughly 140 million babies are born worldwide each year under current medium-variant projections, a figure expected to hold fairly steady through mid-century before declining gradually toward roughly 126 million annual births by 2100 as fertility continues falling in more countries.
How Large Could Generation Beta Become?
McCrindle projects that Generation Beta will represent about 16 percent of the global population by 2035 and roughly 19 percent of the global workforce by that same year. Those figures should be treated as an estimate from a private research firm rather than an official demographic projection, but they are broadly consistent with the arithmetic of global births.
If annual global births hold near 140 million and Generation Beta’s 15-year window (2025 to 2039) roughly mirrors current birth volumes, the cohort could ultimately include more than 2 billion births. That is not the same as 2 billion living Generation Beta members at any future date. Cohort size at birth and population size at a later date diverge because of infant and child mortality, meaning the final “surviving” Generation Beta population by, say, 2040 will be somewhat smaller than the raw birth count.
Estimated Global Births by Generation Cohort
| Generation | Birth Years | Approx. Length | Estimated Global Births |
|---|---|---|---|
| Millennials | 1981-1996 | 16 years | approx. 2.0 billion |
| Generation Z | 1997-2012 | 16 years | approx. 2.1 billion |
| Generation Alpha | 2010/2013-2024 | 12-15 years | approx. 2.0 billion (McCrindle estimate) |
| Generation Beta | 2025-2039 | 15 years | approx. 2.0-2.2 billion (projected) |
Figures for Millennials and Generation Z are derived from historical UN birth data averaged across their commonly cited ranges; Generation Alpha and Beta figures rely partly on McCrindle’s own public estimates combined with UN medium-variant birth projections, and should be read as order-of-magnitude approximations rather than precise counts.
Whether Generation Beta ultimately becomes larger or smaller than Generation Alpha depends heavily on which countries drive future births. If fertility declines faster than the UN’s medium variant assumes, particularly in South Asia and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa where the bulk of future births are concentrated, total Beta births could land below current projections.
Where Generation Beta Will Be Born
Geography is likely to be the single largest source of variation within Generation Beta. The UN’s regional breakdowns show a stark divide in where births are concentrated:
| Region | Share of Global Births (approx., 2024) | Fertility Rate (approx., 2024) |
|---|---|---|
| Sub-Saharan Africa | approx. 29% | approx. 4.3 |
| South Asia | approx. 22% | approx. 2.2 |
| East Asia and Pacific | approx. 15% | approx. 1.3-1.6 |
| Latin America and Caribbean | approx. 8% | approx. 1.8 |
| Europe and Central Asia | approx. 7% | approx. 1.5 |
| North America | approx. 3% | approx. 1.6 |
A Generation Beta child born in Niger, where fertility remains near 6 births per woman, will grow up with an average of four or five siblings in a rapidly expanding national population. A Generation Beta child born in South Korea, where fertility has fallen below 0.8, will very likely be an only child in a country where the number of newborns is shrinking every year. Both children belong to “Generation Beta” by birth year alone. Almost nothing else about their demographic environment is comparable.
How Generation Beta’s Childhood Could Differ From Earlier Cohorts
Several structural conditions are already measurable and likely to shape Generation Beta’s early years regardless of where a specific projection lands:
- Smaller average family size in the majority of countries, driven by the fertility declines already documented above, meaning fewer siblings on average than any previous generation in recorded demographic history in most regions outside Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Older parents. Mean age at first birth has been rising across most OECD countries and much of East Asia, meaning Generation Beta children are more likely to have parents in their thirties than earlier generations were.
- Higher urban concentration. The UN’s World Urbanization Prospects shows the global urban population share continuing to climb, meaning a larger proportion of Generation Beta will grow up in cities than any prior cohort.
- Longer expected lifespan, consistent with continued gains in global life expectancy, reinforcing McCrindle’s point about a meaningful share of the cohort potentially reaching the 22nd century.
- Climate exposure. Generation Beta’s entire childhood and early adulthood will overlap with the period in which most climate models project the most significant physical effects of warming to materialize, though this is a matter of the surrounding environment rather than a demographic statistic.
What Is Measurable Versus What Is Speculation
The single most useful service a Generation Beta explainer can provide is separating verified demographic fact from generational branding. The table below draws that line explicitly.
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Births from 2025 onward are occurring in a lower-fertility world than any prior generation’s birth years | Measurable, UN DESA data |
| Generation Beta will be 16% of global population by 2035 | McCrindle projection, not an official demographic estimate |
| AI will be more embedded in education and healthcare during Beta’s childhood than during Alpha’s | Reasonably supported by current adoption trends, though pace will vary by country |
| Generation Beta will be more curious, more tech-native, or more globally minded as a personality trait | Unverifiable speculation, not a demographic finding |
| Generation Beta children will average fewer siblings than Millennials did | Measurable, consistent with fertility trend data |
| Generation Beta will think and behave differently from Generation Alpha because of when they were born | Contested; researchers warn against attributing personality to birth year alone |
The Limits of Generational Labels
Pew Research Center’s own methodological guidance is instructive here. Pew has argued that apparent generational differences often reflect a mix of three distinct effects that are easy to conflate: age effects (people behave differently at 15 than at 45, regardless of when they were born), period effects (a historic event such as a pandemic or recession shapes everyone alive at that time, not just one generation), and cohort effects (something genuinely tied to shared formative experience). Pew’s 2023 decision to stop assigning new formal generational cutoffs was explicitly grounded in concern that fixed 15-to-20-year labels flatten these three effects into a single, oversimplified story.
Applied to Generation Beta, this means a finding such as “children born in 2025 are growing up with more AI in classrooms than children born in 2010” is a real, measurable period and cohort effect. A claim such as “Generation Beta will be more empathetic” or “Generation Beta will reject social media” is a prediction dressed as a demographic finding, and neither this article nor any current dataset can responsibly support it.
Key Facts
| Metric | Figure | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Proposed Generation Beta birth window | 2025-2039 | McCrindle, 2024 |
| Projected share of global population by 2035 | approx. 16% | McCrindle projection |
| Projected share of global workforce by 2035 | approx. 19% | McCrindle projection |
| Global fertility rate | approx. 2.2 births/woman | 2024, UN DESA |
| Global population | 8.2 billion | 2024, UN WPP 2024 |
| Projected global population peak | approx. 10.3 billion | mid-2080s, UN WPP 2024 |
| Countries with population already peaked | 63 | 2024, UN WPP 2024 |
| Approximate annual global births | 140 million | Current, UN medium-variant estimate |
Conclusion
Generation Beta is best understood as two overlapping stories rather than one. The first is a genuinely measurable demographic story: a cohort born into a world where global fertility has fallen to roughly 2.2 births per woman, where population has already peaked in 63 countries, and where the split between shrinking and still-growing nations will define this cohort’s circumstances more than any shared birth-year identity. The second is a speculative cultural story, built on a private research firm’s naming convention and predictions about AI-saturated childhoods that have not yet happened and cannot yet be verified. Both stories are worth telling. Only one of them belongs in a statistics table.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. When does Generation Beta start?
Most sources, following demographer Mark McCrindle’s original definition, place the start of Generation Beta at January 1, 2025. A small number of alternative frameworks that define Generation Alpha as ending in 2025 or 2026 would shift Beta’s start year accordingly, but 2025 is the most widely cited starting point.
2. How long will Generation Beta last?
McCrindle’s proposed range runs through 2039, giving the cohort a 15-year span, similar in length to Generation Alpha and Generation Z. This is a proposed cultural boundary rather than an officially fixed demographic cutoff.
3. How large will Generation Beta be?
McCrindle projects Generation Beta will reach about 16 percent of global population by 2035. Applied to UN birth projections, total Generation Beta births over its full 15-year window could reach roughly 2 billion, though the final figure depends heavily on how fertility trends evolve in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where a growing share of global births is concentrated.
4. Will Generation Beta be the largest generation in history?
Not necessarily. Generation Alpha is already frequently described as the largest generation in history in absolute terms, with close to 2 billion people born between its start and 2024. Whether Beta exceeds that depends on whether global birth totals hold steady or decline as fertility continues falling in more countries.
5. Why is it called Generation Beta?
The name follows Generation Alpha in using the Greek alphabet rather than a cultural reference, once researchers had exhausted naming options after Generation Z. McCrindle has also framed “Beta” in a technology sense, comparing the generation to an updated software version.
6. Is Generation Beta an official demographic category?
No. Neither the United Nations, the U.S. Census Bureau, nor any national statistical agency uses Generation Beta as a data category. It is a cultural and marketing label created by a private research firm. Population data is collected and reported by age, sex, and birth year, not by generational name.
7. Will all Generation Beta children have the same experience of AI?
No. Technology adoption, school infrastructure, and household income vary enormously by country and region, meaning AI exposure during childhood will differ sharply between, for example, a child born in a major East Asian city and a child born in a rural low-income country during the same years.
8. Will Generation Beta have fewer siblings than earlier generations?
In most countries, yes. Global fertility has fallen from roughly 5 births per woman in the 1960s to about 2.2 in 2024, and more than half of countries now sit below replacement level. Sub-Saharan Africa remains a significant exception, with fertility still averaging above 4 in many countries.
9. What is the difference between Generation Alpha and Generation Beta?
The two labels are separated mainly by birth year, with Alpha covering roughly 2010 to 2024 and Beta covering 2025 to 2039 under McCrindle’s framework. Beta is expected to grow up with more deeply embedded AI infrastructure than Alpha experienced, and current survey data suggests Beta’s Gen Z parents may be more cautious about screen time than Alpha’s Millennial parents were.
10. Should businesses and researchers treat Generation Beta as a reliable planning category?
With caution. The label can be useful shorthand for describing children born from 2025 onward, but planning decisions should rely on verified demographic data such as UN population projections and national birth statistics rather than treating generational personality claims as established fact.
Sources
- United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Population Prospects 2024: Summary of Results,” July 2024
- United Nations, “UN projects world population to peak within this century,” July 2024
- United Nations, World Fertility 2024 report, Population Division
- United Nations Population Facts 2019/6, annual global births estimate
- McCrindle Research, “Meet Generation Beta” blog post and public commentary by Mark McCrindle, 2024-2025
- Pew Research Center, “Assessing the effects of generation using age-period-cohort analysis,” Decoded, May 2023
- Pew Research Center, “Demographic Definitions”
- World Economic Forum commentary on Generation Beta birth-year range
