In 2025, 355 thousand children were born in Italy while 652 thousand people died. The difference is -297 thousand people. We have lost the equivalent of a city like Verona. According to ISTAT data, it is the most negative natural balance in recent history, and comes in a year in which the fertility rate reached its absolute minimum: 1.14 children per woman, down compared to 1.18 in 2024.
A number that tells of a demographic transformation that is increasingly difficult to reverse, and which has its roots in decades of structural conditions (economic, housing, welfare) that have progressively eroded the possibility of having children.
What is the fertility rate and why 1.14 is a scary number
The total fertility rate measures how many children a woman would have on average over her reproductive life, calculating behavior in the year in question. The level of natural population replacement (the one that would guarantee a stable population in the absence of migration) is approximately 2.1. Italy has been well below this for decades, and 2025 marks a new absolute minimum with 1.14 children per woman, down from 1.18 in 2024: in just one year, 15 thousand fewer children were born, with a drop of 3.9%.
The European comparison also places Italy among the most critical cases: the average of the European Union countries was 1.34 in 2024, with France at 1.61 and Spain (the other large Mediterranean country) at 1.10. Low values almost everywhere, but with differences that in practice translate into hundreds of thousands of more or fewer births every year.
Sardinia at 0.85, Trentino at 1.40: the fertility map in Italy
The decline is distributed homogeneously across the territory, but the differences between regions remain marked. For the sixth consecutive year, Sardinia is the region with the lowest fertility in Italy: 0.85 children per woman, a value that places it among the lowest in Europe. Molise (1.02) and Lazio (1.05) follow. On the opposite side, Trentino-Alto Adige maintains the national record with 1.40 children per woman, followed by Sicily (1.23) and Campania (1.22).
Age also weighs on this data: in 2025 the average age at birth across Italy reached 32.7 years, with the Center reaching 33.1. Every year that this threshold is raised is one year less of reproductive life and, statistically, a few fewer births.
Because not even having French fertility would solve the problem
There is an element of the Italian demographic crisis that public debate tends to overlook, and which Istat has precisely quantified. The decline in births also depends on the reduction in the number of women of childbearing age, i.e. of potential parents themselves. It is the direct consequence of decades of low fertility: the generations born in the 1980s and 1990s were already smaller than the previous ones, and today they are those of reproductive age. To understand how much this matters, a calculation is enough: if in 2024 Italy had recorded the same propensity to have children as France (1.61 children per woman) the number of births would have been around 494 thousand, significantly higher than the actual 370 thousand. Yet, in the same year, France recorded 664 thousand births, with a fertility rate identical to the hypothetical Italian one.
The difference depends entirely on the age structure of the French population, with much larger generations of reproductive age. The demographic gap, in other words, has accumulated over time and cannot be closed by changing only reproductive behaviors but also social and family models.
The paradox: families grow, children decline
An apparently contradictory figure fits into this picture: in the two-year period 2024-2025 there will be 26 million and 600 thousand families in Italy, over 4 million more than at the beginning of the 2000s. Families are increasing, however, because the nuclei are breaking down: 37.1% are now made up of a single person, compared to 25.9% twenty years ago.
Couples with children, who for decades have represented the prevalent model, have fallen to 28.4% of the total. Today, single-parent families are one in ten. The average family size has gone from 2.6 to 2.2 members in the space of two decades. The result is a country with more families but smaller ones, lonelier, less able to bring children into the world.
The family that doesn’t form: why singles are increasing and births are decreasing
Behind the increase in single-person families there is a phenomenon that the Economist defined at the end of 2025 relationship recession: a global contraction in the formation of stable couples which overlaps with, and partly amplifies, the decline in fertility.
The reasoning is linear: in Italy having children remains closely linked to the stability of a relationship. Unlike France and Sweden, where those born out of wedlock are now the majority (but almost always within recognized cohabitations), in our country the stable couple remains in the vast majority of cases the prerequisite for parenthood.
When couples form later, form less, or break up earlier, the number of potential parents shrinks further than the structural demographic decline already does. A study published in 2025 on Journal of Population Research measured this effect on Australian data: the reduction in the share of couples in the population contributed directly and measurably to the decline in fertility rates, especially in the younger age groups. Obviously each country has its own peculiarities but the Australian one is a social mechanism that Italian demography knows well, even if it is rarely put at the center of the debate: in 2025 marriages fell to 165 thousand, 8 thousand less than in 2024, with a decline concentrated above all on religious rites (-11.7%). The average age at first marriage is close to 35 for men. Couples form late, and when they form late they have fewer children – or none at all.
Home, work, welfare: why postponing has become the most rational choice
Reducing the demographic crisis to a cultural issue – Italians no longer wanting to have children – is a simplification. The average age at childbirth of 32.7 years says something precise: children are postponed until conditions allow, and sometimes that moment never arrives. Behind this postponement there is a combination of economic and structural factors that have tightened over the last twenty years. The cost of housing in large cities has made it increasingly difficult to form an independent family unit before the age of thirty.
Contractual precariousness, concentrated precisely in the age groups in which it would be biologically more favorable to have children, pushes us to postpone a choice that requires stability. The early childhood welfare system (nurseries, parental leave, family support) remains among the least developed in Europe, with uneven coverage that penalizes the South in particular and women, who still bear the largest share of care work.
The result is that the choice to have children, for a growing share of Italians, becomes rationally postponable. And when the demographic system has been working this way for some time, it stops being a question of individual intentions and becomes a collective trap: today’s children are missing, but tomorrow’s potential parents are also missing.
