The Baby Bust: Why Gen Z Isn't Having Kids And What This Means for America’s Future

Jack Zhou and Andrew Lu — August 4, 2026

For most of American history, worrying about too few babies would have sounded absurd. But in 2026, the country is confronting a demographic reality that once seemed like a uniquely East Asian or European problem: Americans, especially the youngest adults among them, are having historically few children. The reasons are tangled together — economic anxiety, a genuine retreat from dating and sex, and a social media-soaked culture that makes forming relationships harder than it used to be. And the one force that has quietly propped up U.S. population growth for decades, immigration, is now shrinking too. Understanding why birth rates are declining, and what other countries have tried in response, is essential to understand where America is headed.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

The U.S. general fertility rate hit another record low in 2025, according to provisional data released by the CDC this spring. The rate fell to 53.1 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, down 1% from 2024, continuing a decline that has been underway since 2007. About 3.6 million babies were born in the U.S. last year, a figure that is nearly 20% lower than it was two decades ago.

The steepest drops are happening among the youngest women. Teen fertility fell 7% in 2025 alone and has plunged more than 70% since 2007, while birth rates for women in their early 20s have also fallen sharply. Meanwhile, births by women in their early 30s ticked up about 3%, reinforcing what demographers already suspected: people aren’t necessarily rejecting parenthood outright, they’re delaying it, sometimes indefinitely. Census data cited alongside the CDC report shows that the share of childless women ages 25 to 29 jumped from about 50% in 2014 to 63% in 2024.

Wellesley College economist Phillip Levine put it bluntly to Reuters: shifting priorities among younger women, including “greater and more demanding job market opportunities, expanded leisure options, [and] increased intensity of parenting,” have made the option to have children “less desirable.” This is a tidy summary of a much more complicated set of forces working against Gen Z family formation.

Gen Z’s Sex Recession

Before Gen Z can decide whether to have kids, many of them have to decide whether to date and have sex at all — and increasingly, they aren’t. Journalist Carter Sherman, who has spent years interviewing teens and people in their 20s for her book “The Second Coming,” told PBS that only about a third of high school students have had sex today, down from roughly half when she was in school in the early 2010s. Among adult members of Gen Z, she said, only about one in four have had partnered sex, and even masturbation is declining, a finding she called stunning to researchers.

The University of Chicago’s General Social Survey backs this up: three in ten Gen Z men ages 18 to 25 reported not having had sex in the last year, roughly double the rate among Millennials at the same age, while the figure for Gen Z women is about one in four, up from one in seven for Millennial women. Notably, researchers say this isn’t just a side-effect of the pandemic, since the numbers looked similar in 2018, before COVID hit.

The Institute for Family Studies points to a related, unglamorous cause: young adults simply spend less time around each other than they used to. Average weekly social time for 18-to-29-year-olds fell from 12.8 hours in 2010 to 6.5 hours in 2019, and the share of young adults living with a partner dropped from 42% to 32% between 2014 and 2024. Fewer people cohabiting means fewer people having regular partnered sex, which in turn means fewer unplanned or planned pregnancies.

Still, not everyone agrees the picture is quite so dire. A 2026 Newsweek analysis of health app data found Gen Z respondents reported only a slightly lower rate of partnered sexual activity than older groups, and argued the real story may be a shift in what counts as satisfying — emotional connection over frequency — rather than outright avoidance. Sherman herself doesn’t chalk the trend up to prudishness; she points instead to anxieties about attacks on reproductive freedom, the isolation of coming of age during the pandemic, and poor sex education as reasons many young people are abstaining.

DATING APP BURNOUT

Whatever is happening in the bedroom starts, for most people, on a phone screen — and that’s where a lot of the trouble seems to originate. A Forbes Health survey found 78% of dating app users report burnout, driven by decision fatigue, the sense that no match is ever final, and the gamified, dopamine-chasing design of the apps themselves. Coverage from Rolling Out describes a familiar cycle: users delete the apps for their mental health, then reinstall them weeks later when loneliness creeps back in, despite knowing the apps will likely just make them feel worse.

The fatigue has been dramatic enough to revive an old-fashioned industry. Matchmaker Germany Fox told The Independent that her younger clients are “sick and tired of the trappings of modern dating, from ghosting to catfishing,” and firms like Three Day Rule report a marked uptick in clients 27 and younger. Even Hinge, one of the most popular dating apps, has thrown $1 million at the problem, funding grants for in-person meetup events in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and New York.

Underneath the app fatigue sits something heavier: a full-blown loneliness epidemic. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2023 advisory on the subject found that chronic loneliness carries health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and researchers who have studied the topic since say the crisis is hitting the most digitally connected generation the hardest, not the elderly or rural populations one might expect. Social media, the thinking goes, gives people the appearance of connection — likes, followers, group chats — without much actual intimacy, leaving many Gen Zers surrounded by contacts but with no one to call when things fall apart.

The Economics of Baby-Making

Even Gen Zers who do want kids increasingly say they can’t afford them. According to LendingTree, the cost of raising a child from birth through age 18 hit $303,418 in 2026, the first time the estimate has topped $300,000 since the firm began tracking it in 2023. Day care alone can run more than $17,000 a year, well beyond the 7% of household income the federal government has long considered “affordable” — most families are paying two to three times that share. Fortune reports the surge is being driven partly by a nearly 50% year-over-year spike in average rent paid by families with children.

The financial anxiety shows up directly in survey data. A YouGov, Wheatley Institute, and Deseret News poll found a record 71% of respondents said raising children is unaffordable, a 13-point jump from just the year before, and named cost as the single biggest reason people limit their family size. Separately, LendingTree found 46% of parents with young children say they’ve had fewer kids specifically because of money, and a CBS News poll found 77% of Americans believe it’s harder to raise a family today than it was for previous generations.

Where Immigration Used to Fill the Gap

For decades, the U.S. never had to reckon with its falling birth rate the way South Korea or Japan did, because immigration kept the population growing even as native births slowed. That cushion is now disappearing at the same moment the birth rate is falling — a new problem for American demographers.

Census Bureau estimates released this year show the U.S. population grew by just 0.5% from July 2024 to July 2025, a sharp drop from the nearly 1% growth rate in 2024, which had been the fastest in two decades and was driven almost entirely by immigration. Net immigration fell from 2.8 million people in 2024 to just 1.3 million in 2025, and the Bureau projects it could fall to only 321,000 by mid-2026 if the Trump administration’s deportation and border enforcement campaign continues at its current pace. Immigrant-heavy states are already feeling it: California posted a net population loss for the first time in years, and Florida and New York both saw immigration-driven growth collapse.

The natural increase side — births minus deaths — isn’t picking up the slack either. Natural increase totaled just 519,000 people in 2025, dramatically smaller than the 1.6 to 1.9 million range typical of the 2000s. Longer-range, the math gets worse: the Congressional Budget Office projects the U.S. birth surplus will collapse entirely by 2030, meaning deaths will start to outnumber births nationally, just as they already do in Japan, Hungary, and China. At that point, immigration won’t just be a “nice-to-have” for U.S. population growth — it will be the only thing standing between America and outright decline, at precisely the moment federal policy is working to shrink it.

A Global Baby Bust

America’s predicament looks less like an anomaly and more like a delayed arrival at a party much of the developed and even developing world has already been at for years. Looking abroad shows both how universal the underlying forces are, and how little success governments have had bending them back.

SOUTH KOREA

No country illustrates the scale of the crisis, or the limits of throwing money at it, better than South Korea. Its total fertility rate has cratered from 6.0 in 1960 to roughly 0.72 today, the lowest ever recorded anywhere in the world, despite the government spending more than 280 trillion won (over $200 billion) since 2006 on cash grants, IVF funding, and parental leave. Demographers have coined the term “Sampo generation” — the “three giving-ups” — to describe young South Korean women who have given up dating, marriage, and children altogether, largely because of economic pressure and a culture where men still do comparatively little housework and child care. Statistics Korea projects the country’s population could shrink from 51.75 million today to as low as 36.22 million by 2072, a level not seen since 1977.

HUNGARY

Hungary has become the pronatalist movement’s favorite case study, and its record is far messier than boosters admit. Since 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán rolled out zero-interest “baby-expecting” loans, debt forgiveness, and housing subsidies for married couples, spending around 5% of GDP on family benefits — among the highest shares in the developed world. Fertility did rise for a decade, climbing from a low of 1.25 in 2010 to 1.59 in 2021, and U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have both pointed to Hungary as a model other anti-immigration nationalists might follow. But the rate has since fallen back to around 1.31 to 1.39, barely above where it started, and births hit a record low in 2024. Demographer Tomas Sobotka of the Vienna Institute told the BBC plainly: “Judged by the aims of the policies, this is clearly a failure.”

THE NORDICS

Perhaps the most unsettling data point for policymakers comes from the countries that were supposed to have already solved this. Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland offer generous paid parental leave, subsidized child care, and free education, and for decades were treated as proof that the right welfare policies could sustain healthy birth rates. Instead, their fertility has fallen to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, with Finland below 1.3 children per woman. A Kela research manager told NPR, “we cannot really any longer say that it’s our good family policies that explain good fertility in the Nordics.” Researchers at the Institute for Family Studies have floated a “workism” theory: as the importance people assign to their careers rose in Nordic countries over the past decade, fertility fell alongside it, suggesting the barrier isn’t affordability so much as competing priorities and uncertainty about the future.

CHINA

China shows what happens when a low birth rate collides with limited immigration and an aging population all at once. Its birthrate fell to 5.63 births per 1,000 people in 2025, the lowest level since 1949, with 7.92 million births against 11.31 million deaths, shrinking the population by 3.4 million for a fourth consecutive year. Unlike the U.S., China has historically shied away from mass immigration as a fix, leaving it with a shrinking workforce, a straining pension system, and the prospect of losing up to 250 million people from its population by 2050.

FRANCE, THE RELATIVE BRIGHT SPOT

Not every country’s story is bleak. France’s fertility rate has held between 1.8 and 1.9 since 2000, well above most of the rest of Europe, thanks to a comprehensive system combining a nearly universal free preschool starting at age three, subsidized municipal day care, and a layered set of cash child allowances that together amount to nearly 4% of GDP. Even France, though, remains below the 2.1 replacement threshold, and researchers caution that its relative success reflects decades of consistent policy investment, not a quick fix.

What America Is Trying

The Trump administration has embraced pronatalism more explicitly than any White House in recent memory. Vice President JD Vance declared days after his inauguration that “I want more babies in the United States of America,” and has pushed to expand the child tax credit, while the administration has fielded proposals from outside advocates including a National Medal of Motherhood and expanded fertility education.

The most concrete idea to emerge is a proposed $5,000 “baby bonus” paid to mothers after childbirth, which Trump called “a good idea” when asked about it, though no final decision has been made. More formally, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act created “Trump Accounts,” tax-advantaged savings accounts seeded with $1,000 in federal funds for every eligible child born between 2025 and 2029, with deposits beginning this year. The administration has also promoted access to IVF, and launched TrumpRx.gov to discount fertility drugs.

Whether any of it works is an open question, and Hungary’s example is not encouraging. Population Connection’s Brian Dixon told CNN he can’t recall any other administration so closely tied to the pronatalist movement, but critics note that a one-time $5,000 payment is unlikely to offset a $300,000 lifetime cost, and that the same administration’s immigration crackdown is simultaneously eliminating the one lever that has reliably kept America’s population growing for decades.

Conclusion

Taken together, the American, East Asian, and European experiences point to an uncomfortable truth: no country has yet found a policy that reliably reverses a falling birth rate once it sets in, whether that country throws cash at new parents, builds a generous welfare state, or does both. What does seem to move the needle, even modestly, is sustained investment over decades rather than one-off bonuses, paired with genuine cultural shifts in how much of the burden of child-rearing falls on women. For Gen Z, the obstacles run deeper than a tax credit can reach — a dating culture reshaped by apps and algorithms, a loneliness epidemic public health officials compare to a pack-a-day smoking habit, and a cost of living that makes even wanting a family feel like a luxury. The United States is now the latest country forced to ask whether it can afford to keep ignoring all three at once, especially as the immigration safety valve that has quietly sustained its population for a century continues to close.

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