Overview
- Germany’s statistics office, which released preliminary figures Tuesday, counted 654,300 births in 2025, down 3.4% from 2024, alongside about 1.01 million deaths.
- Officials cite two drivers: the small birth cohorts of the 1990s now reaching their early 30s and a drop in the period fertility rate since 2022, a metric showing how many children a woman would have under today’s conditions.
- Births fell faster in the East at 4.5% than in the West at 3.2%, with Hamburg the only state to see a rise and Mecklenburg‑Vorpommern posting the steepest fall at 8.4%.
- After Tuesday’s release, Thuringia’s premier Mario Voigt urged tax relief for larger families, proposing to free one parent from income tax starting with a third child as calls for better childcare and housing support resurfaced.
- The results are provisional until detailed July 2026 data, early EU figures point to similar 2025 declines in France, Austria, Italy and Sweden, and official projections say births in Germany are unlikely to return to the 2021 peak even with higher fertility and net migration.