Women Average Fewer Than 1.3 Children in Over a Third of EU Regions

Births counted region by region

The total fertility rate condenses one year of births into a single number: how many children a woman would have by the end of her childbearing years if, at each age, she had children as often as women of that age did in the year measured. It describes the behaviour of a given year, not the families anyone actually completes. About 2.1 is the conventional replacement level, the rate at which a generation, without migration, is as large as the one that bore it.

Eurostat publishes the rate for NUTS 2 regions, the middle tier of the classification it uses to divide the Union into comparable territories. In Spain these are the autonomous communities and the two autonomous cities; in Italy the regions, with Trentino-Alto Adige split into its two autonomous provinces; Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Luxembourg and Malta count as a single region each. For 2024 the table covers 244 regions in all 27 Member States.

Eighty-eight regions under 1.3

The 1.3 line is where demographers place lowest-low fertility: a rate that, if it persisted, would leave each generation far smaller than the one that bore it. In 2024 the rate was below 1.3 in 88 of the 244 regions, more than a third of them.

The national series puts the EU as a whole at 1.34, a few hundredths above the line, and finds ten Member States below it. Region by region the band is far wider: nineteen Member States contain at least one region below 1.3. The eight with none are Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Ireland, Slovenia and Sweden.

A decade earlier the count was about a third of that. Among the 239 regions that have a value for both 2014 and 2024, 30 were below 1.3 in 2014. The rate fell in 210 of those 239 regions, rose in 25 and was unchanged in four, and in eighteen Member States every region recorded a lower rate at the end of the decade than at the start.

Part of that comparison needs care. Eurostat marks a break in the regional series of Czechia, Germany, Greece, Italy and Poland at some point after 2014, so for their 97 regions the two years are not fully comparable. Setting those five countries aside leaves 142 regions in 22 Member States, and there the count below 1.3 went from 13 to 39: the same tripling, without the breaks.

Spain, Italy and Poland: below 1.3 almost everywhere

Three countries supply 53 of the 88 regions. Italy has 20 of its 21 regions below 1.3, Spain 17 of 19 and Poland 16 of 17.

What is left above the line in those three countries is short enough to name. In Italy it is the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, in the German-speaking far north, at 1.51. In Spain there are two: the Region of Murcia on the south-eastern coast at 1.32 and Melilla, the Spanish autonomous city on the North African coast, at 1.36. In Poland it is Mazowiecki regionalny — the part of Mazowieckie province that lies outside the Warsaw capital region — at 1.31.

The low national rates of these countries are therefore not averages of high and low places. They are what almost every region of each country records.

Five regions below one child per woman

Five regions record fewer than one child per woman. Spain's Canary Islands have the lowest rate in the Union at 0.82. The Italian island of Sardinia follows at 0.91, then three regions of Spain's Atlantic north: Asturias at 0.95, Galicia at 0.96 and Cantabria at 0.99. Malta, a single region, comes next at 1.01.

In 2014 only two regions were below one, Asturias and the Portuguese island of Madeira, both at 0.99. Madeira has since climbed to 1.26. The Canary Islands, then at 1.05, are now 0.23 lower.

Capital regions at or near the bottom

Twenty-two Member States are divided into more than one region. In ten of them the region that contains the capital records the lowest rate in the country: Budapest at 1.07, a long way below the 1.67 of Észak-Magyarország in northern Hungary; Sostinės regionas, the Vilnius capital region of Lithuania, at 1.09; Attica, the region of Athens, at 1.14; Bucharest-Ilfov at 1.19; Prague at 1.26; the City of Zagreb at 1.32; Hovedstaden, the Copenhagen region, at 1.40; Eastern and Midland, the Irish region around Dublin, at 1.41; Zahodna Slovenija, the western region of Slovenia that includes Ljubljana, at 1.46; and Yugozapaden, the south-western Bulgarian region that includes Sofia, at 1.55. In seven more — Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden — the capital region is second lowest.

The five exceptions are of two opposite kinds. In Spain, Italy and Poland the capital does not stand out because little else does: the Comunidad de Madrid at 1.09, Lazio, the region of Rome, at 1.10 and Warsaw's capital region at 1.08 sit inside national fields that are low from end to end. France and Portugal are the reverse. Île-de-France, the Paris region, records 1.68, level at two decimals with Picardie in northern France for the highest rate in metropolitan France, and Grande Lisboa, the Lisbon region, records 1.65, level at two decimals with the Algarve on the southern coast and exceeded in Portugal only by the Setúbal peninsula across the Tagus at 1.69.

The highest rates: overseas France and Bulgaria

Three regions are at or above 2.1, and all three are French overseas departments: Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean between Mozambique and Madagascar, at 3.54; French Guiana, on the north-eastern coast of South America, at 3.11; and Réunion, east of Madagascar, at 2.12. All three values, like every French region's, are provisional. In 2014 five regions reached the level. Guadeloupe, a French overseas department in the Caribbean, has since fallen from 2.27 to 1.81 and Melilla from 2.68 to 1.36.

Outside the overseas departments the two highest rates in the Union are both Bulgarian. Yugoiztochen, in south-eastern Bulgaria, records 2.04 and Severozapaden, in the north-west of the country, 1.92. Of the 22 Member States with more than one region, Bulgaria is the only one where no region had a lower rate in 2024 than in 2014: five of its six regions rose and the sixth was unchanged.