Australia’s total fertility rate recorded a tiny bump up after a decade of decline. That’s what the experts will tell you, and technically they’re right. But they have little idea what they’re talking about.
Like many statistics, the fertility rate has been overwhelmed by temporary immigration.
The total fertility rate is the fertility of all women resident in the country. That did indeed decline from 1.80 in 2015 to 1.48 in 2024 before recording a slight recovery to 1.50 in 2025. That’s a drop of 17.7%.
But there are more than a million women who are only temporarily resident in the country, and few of them are here to have children. They’re here to study, work, and send money back to their home countries. But all of them “count” in Australia’s fertility statistics.
The government doesn’t collect data on the citizenship of mothers giving birth, but it does collect their countries of birth. Tracking just the fertility of Australian-born women, that fell from 1.82 in 2015 to 1.61 in 2025, a more modest fall of 11.5%.
That kind of decline might raise concerns over the long term, except for two things.
First, fertility is volatile and responsive to policy interventions, at least in Australia. When Peter Costello offered parents just $4000 to help offset the costs of having a child, fertility rose 13.5% in just four years.
In other words, for a couple billion dollars a year it is likely that Australia could completely reverse its fertility decline.
Second, over the last ten years there has been a massive shift in the age at which women have children. In 2015, the median age of mothers at delivery was 31.0. By 2015, it had risen to 32.1. Simple arithmetic means that an upward shift like this in the age of mothers results in a temporary decline in fertility.
Imagine that all women simultaneously decided to take a year off having children, but still had the same number of children over the course of their childbearing years. That would be reflected in a single year of zero fertility, followed by a return to normal the next year.
The current 1-year increase in the age of mothers having children took place over 10 years (not 1 year), but the principle is the same. If they still have the same number of babies over the course of their lives, fertility rates will recover when the age increase stabilises.
These are all technical details that Australia’s leading demographers (or at least the ones talking to the press) seem not to understand.
The head of population statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Beidar Cho, either didn’t mention any of this when talking to Newscorp, or the reporter didn’t consider it worth reporting.
The same article cites Terry Rawnsley of KPMG as explaining that “the disparity in births between the regions and the cities is a reflection of affordability.” He seems not to have realised that most of the women of childbearing age in the city centres are international students.
The fertility gradient between the regions and the cities closely mirrors patterns of international students (who don’t have children) and women with careers (who are having children later than they were previously).
The Herald and Age also quoted Rawnsley saying that in 2023 and 2024 “interest rates were kind of softening a bit at that time, so people had the confidence to press go on the family, and we’ve seen that baby bounce come through in 2025.”
If that’s true, it’s funny that only foreign-born women responded to lower rates, while Australian-born women were discouraged by them.
The truth is that Australia’s fertility rates are healthy, and could be even healthier if the country hearkened Peter Costello’s repeated exhortations to restore the baby bonus. Even without it, the fertility of Australian women is among the highest in the developed world.
With policy tweaks to make parenting just a little bit easier (and a little bit more affordable), Australia could completely avoid any hint of a fertility crisis and maintain its population through natural increase indefinitely into the future.
Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney.
