Vruchtbaarheidscijfer per land 2026

The highest and lowest fertility rates

Every one of the ten highest fertility rates is in Africa. Somalia (6.13 births per woman in 2023), Chad (6.12), Niger (6.06), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (6.05) and the Central African Republic (6.01) form a band of countries where a woman still has six children on average, roughly what the world as a whole averaged in the early 1960s. Mali, Angola, Burundi, Afghanistan and Mozambique complete the top ten; Afghanistan, at 4.84, is the only country outside Africa above 4.5.

The bottom of the table is East Asian and European. Macao has the lowest fertility rate recorded anywhere, 0.59 births per woman, with the Republic of Korea (0.72), Hong Kong (0.75), Puerto Rico (0.92) and Singapore (0.97) also below one child per woman. Ukraine (0.98), China (1.00), Malta, Spain and Poland follow. For scale: a fertility rate of 0.7 means that each generation is about a third the size of the one before it, a rate of shrinkage no country has ever sustained.

The replacement line

The replacement level — 2.1 children per woman, the rate at which a generation exactly replaces itself once child mortality is accounted for — divides this table almost in half: 101 of the 194 countries with data are below it in 2023. The world average, 5.31 in 1963, fell to 2.73 by 2000 and stands at 2.20 in 2023, only a fraction above replacement. Regionally, Sub-Saharan Africa averages 4.33 and the Middle East and North Africa 3.01, while South Asia (2.00), Latin America (1.80), North America (1.58), Europe (1.58), the European Union (1.39) and East Asia and the Pacific (1.34) are all below the line. India, long the textbook example of rapid growth, is at 1.98. Among large rich countries France (1.66) and the United States (1.62) are the highest; Germany (1.39), Italy and Japan (both 1.20) and Spain (1.12) are among the lowest.

The "below replacement since" column shows how long each country has been under the line without interruption. For much of Europe that is the early 1970s, which is why the pyramids of Germany or Italy are already narrow at the base and thick in the 50s and 60s: the cohorts born before the decline are now approaching retirement, and everything below them is smaller.

What the number does and does not tell you

Fertility is the single strongest determinant of a pyramid's shape. A rate near 6 produces the broad-based expansive pyramid of Niger or Chad; a rate near 1 produces the inverted, top-heavy structure of Korea or Japan; a rate near replacement gives the near-vertical sides of a stationary pyramid. Because today's births become the working-age population of the 2040s, the rates in this table set the trajectory shown on the 2050 and 2100 projection pages more than any other variable.

Two caveats. These are World Bank World Development Indicators figures for the latest available year — 2023 for nearly every country — and they are observations, not projections; the UN projection pages on this site model future fertility separately. And a handful of territories are absent because the World Bank does not report them: Taiwan, the French overseas departments, the Channel Islands and Western Sahara. Their population pyramids are still on this site, but they do not appear in this ranking.