Low birthrates in Australia’s biggest cities deepened in 2024 amid sustained cost-of-living pressures, dragging the national rate to a near-record low.
Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane each saw further declines in the number of children born per woman from 2023 to 2024, according to KPMG’s preliminary analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics population data, barely offset by increases in Perth and in regional Australia.
The analysis also found outer-suburban and regional Australians grew increasingly likely to have higher numbers of children per person than their inner-city neighbours.
Overall the country’s fertility rate, or children born per woman, was 1.51 in 2024, statistically similar to the 1.5 observed in 2023 and well below the rate of 1.8 observed a decade beforehand.
Young families continued to delay or give up on having children in the face of elevated living costs over the year, according to Amanda Davies, professor of demography at the University of Western Australia.
“Not much has changed for people who are looking at having a family or thinking about extending their family; they are really struggling,” Davies said.
“There’s a feeling they need to have secure housing before starting a family, and that extreme housing crisis that’s being faced in all parts of Australia is [related] to that declining fertility rate.”
Falling confidence in the future and changing cultural expectations have also contributed to a long-term decline in Australia’s fertility rates which has accelerated since the 2000s, according to economist Ashton De Silva.
Inner-urban rates have fallen particularly far, with families pushed out of crowded capital cities by soaring costs for multi-bedroom homes, schools and hospitals.
“Children are becoming more and more expensive,” said De Silva, a professor at RMIT University.
“Unless something drastic changes, I would probably continue to expect to see that families are going to be located on the urban fringes.”
Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane each saw fertility rates fall further in 2024, with the Victorian capital the lowest at 1.4, compared with 1.71 in 2014.
The decline was in part offset by increased childbirths in regional centres as young parents pursued jobs and affordable housing, according to Terry Rawnsley, urban economist at KPMG.
“People have shifted out of Sydney and Melbourne – sparked by Covid, followed up by ability to work remotely, and then housing [cost] refugees – [to] places like Newcastle and Geelong,” he said.
Further decline in birthrates below the replacement rate of 2.1 children born per woman would see locally born populations shrink and increase the capitals’ reliance on interstate and international migration to fill local job shortages, Rawnsley said.
In regional Australia, though, the total numbers of children born each year has risen over the last decade in absolute terms, despite falling in the capitals.
Perth was an exception among the capital cities in 2024, seeing its birth numbers stabilise and its fertility rate rebound to its highest point since 2021, helped by a stronger jobs market and relatively better affordability than the eastern capitals, Rawnsley said.
“If people are confident about the economy and cost-of-living is taking a back seat, they’re going to get out there and add to the family,” he said.
Temporary economic upswings and better affordability and service access in the western capital and regional centres have only slowed the long-term decline in birthrates, which are still well below levels seen a decade ago, UWA’s Davies said.
Australia’s fertility rates could fall further to 1.45 before 2030 without substantial improvement in housing security, living costs and job prospects for parents, according to research published in the medical journal The Lancet.
“We’re still expecting to see … population fertility decline, until we start to arrest the factors that are driving that in terms of cost of living,” Davies said.
