Falling birth rates: 62 per cent of Italians are choosing not to have children due to economic and social difficulties
For more than 2.8 million people, the decision is driven by concerns about family sustainability, whilst nearly one in two women fears the impact on her career: the report by the Foundation for Birth Rates calls for appropriate measures
Key points
More than 6 out of 10 Italians of childbearing age say they have decided against having more children due to economic and social obstacles, whilst for just 5.5 per cent, parenthood is not part of their life plan. This is the key finding to emerge from the ‘2026 Birth Rate Dossier: Wanting or Being Able’, produced by the Fondazione per la Natalità in collaboration with Istat and presented in Rome under the patronage of INPS. The message is that the collapse in the birth rate, which reached a new all-time low in 2025 with 355,000 children and a fertility rate falling to 1.14 children per woman, is not due to a cultural shift or a lack of desire to have large families, but rather to structural factors – namely economic, work-related and social obstacles. According to the report, over 2.8 million Italians cite economic and work-related difficulties as the primary reason for deciding not to have children. Had the fertility intentions expressed by Italian women been realised, around 760,000 children would have been born in 2025 – more than double the number actually born last year.
Women are the hardest hit by unfavourable external circumstances: almost one in two (49.9 per cent) fears that motherhood will have a negative impact on their career, compared with 24 per cent of men. But caregiving roles, which are predominantly shouldered by women, also play a significant part: over 3 million women are economically inactive for family reasons (compared with 151,000 men), in addition to the 763,000 people who choose not to have children partly because they need to care for elderly parents. This is the so-called ‘sandwich generation’, caught between the care demands of older and younger generations.
The welfare system is creaking
Causes, choices and consequences that cannot be regarded as ‘private’ but as a genuine threat to the sustainability of the welfare system as it stands today: the ‘empty cradles’ phenomenon in a country that ranks among the world’s longest-living, with a life expectancy at birth of 83.4 years – compared with 81.5 years in the EU and 78.4 years in the US (OECD data for 2022) – contributes to a negative natural balance of almost 300,000 people in 2025, the difference between 652,000 deaths and, indeed, 355,000 births in that year. The pressure on the healthcare and pension systems – where fewer and fewer young people are called upon to support an inverted pyramid dominated by the elderly – has already become extremely intense. Summing up the situation, whilst announcing a recovery that, at best, will be naturally ‘slow’, is Istat President Francesco Maria Chelli: ‘The falling birth rate is the most pressing problem we face in Italia, a trend that began in the 1970s when fertility rates – that is, the average number of children per woman – started to decline. Today the figure stands at 1.18, whilst the replacement rate – which would allow the population to remain stable – is almost double that, at 2.1,” he explains. “This is driving down the number of births, whilst we have an ageing population and workforce, with many people moving out of the 15–64 age group and into the over-65s. This group will continue to grow in the coming years at the expense of the working-age population. The reasons for not having children – as Chelli summarised – are, in general, financial difficulties for men, job insecurity for women and the burden of caring for the elderly for the ‘sandwich generation’.”
France is a long way away
By 2050, the ratio of the population aged over 65 to that aged under 14 will be 300 to 100. “The issue of the falling birth rate,” the Istat president went on to warn, “is a problem facing Western society: in South Korea, the rate is below one child per woman. Some countries have taken a more systematic approach, such as France, which currently stands at around 1.6 children per woman but is experiencing a rapid decline. Our recovery from the demographic trap, even under the best conditions, will be slow,” he explained. “As Istat, we continuously monitor the phenomenon and have carried out an exercise: if we multiply the number of children per woman born in France by the average number of women of childbearing age in Italia, the result is a figure certainly higher than the current 355,000 births but much lower than the figure across the Alps, because the number of women of childbearing age here has shrunk over the years. ‘Reversing this trend and restoring the balance would take a very long time.’
