The CDC’s newly posted provisional birth data shows that births in the United States fell slightly in 2025, offering what officials described as the first detailed look at the year’s tally after missing months were filled in. The agency said just over 3.6 million births had been reported through birth certificates as of the update, a number that comes in about 24,000 lower than in 2024.
The update comes from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, which posts provisional birth counts based on the arrival and processing of birth certificates. The CDC said the posted numbers for 2025 account for nearly all of the births recorded for the year, but it also said data are still being compiled and analyzed and that the final count could include only a limited number of additional births.
Robert Anderson, who oversees birth and death tracking at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said the total might “only add ‘a few thousand additional births.’” Anderson was speaking as the CDC released the additional months of data needed to complete the year’s provisional view.
Experts interviewed alongside the release pointed to longer-running demographic and economic pressures that can affect both whether people have children and when they do so. Demographer Karen Guzzo, of the University of North Carolina, said people are marrying later and that uncertainty around money, health insurance and other resources can factor into decisions about raising children.
Guzzo also said the relationship between childbearing and economic conditions helps explain why a rise in births seen in 2024 did not necessarily signal a continuing upswing. She said births increased in 2024 over the year before, but that the fertility rate—an estimate tied to whether each generation has enough children to replace itself—actually fell, noting that the fertility rate has been sliding for close to two decades in the United States.
For 2025, Guzzo said she “wouldn’t expect birth or fertility rates to have risen,” adding that she expected them to fall because childbearing is highly related to economic conditions and uncertainty. She also said most 2025 births would have involved children conceived in 2024, when, she said, people were worried about affordability and political polarization.
The birth pattern in the data also reflects a broader historical run of declines and brief rebounds. The CDC and outside experts described U.S. births and birth rates falling for years, with declines in 2020, followed by two years of increases attributed in part to pregnancies that were put off during the early COVID-19 pandemic.
In the background of the shifting numbers, the Trump administration took steps it said aimed to encourage more births. The administration issued an executive order intended to expand access to and reduce costs of in vitro fertilization and supported the idea of “baby bonuses” that might encourage more couples to have children. So far, the CDC has only posted the number of births, rather than birth rates and other details that could help show who is having babies.