Skyrocketing housing costs may be swaying Americans from having children, contributing to plunging birth rates in the country, data suggests.
According to the latest birth data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of births across the nation climbed by a modest 1 percent from 2023 to 2024, for a total of 3,628,934 births. At the same time, the general fertility rate fell 1 percent to 53.8 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 44. Birth rates also dropped among younger women aged 15 to 34, while remaining unchanged for older age groups.
Though last year gave us a small improvement in the number of births in the U.S., historical data shows a much more dire picture. Last year, the nation’s fertility rate was fewer than 1.6 kids per woman, down from 2.1 in 2006—the rate the country needs to sustain its current population levels without immigration.
There are many factors behind the U.S.’s plunging birth rates, including greater financial burdens, economic uncertainty, increased access to education and contraception, and women prioritizing their careers over parenthood.
“We know that birth rates are falling mostly among younger people. This indicates that the fall in the overall birth rate is driven in large part by a process of delay—people used to have kids earlier, and now they are having them later,” Leslie Root, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder studying fertility and population policy, told Newsweek.
“At the same time, we know that people generally still report that the ideal family size is around two kids, and that some people are not achieving their desired family size,” she added. “So it is a mix of things—later births, some people avoiding unintended births, and some people not having the births they actually want to have.”
Among these factors is the rising cost of housing, which is eroding Americans’ ability to obtain what has traditionally been a pillar of family formation—a home of one’s own.
How Has the Cost of Housing Increased Over the Past Two Decades?
An analysis by Realtor.com found that between 2006 and 2024, the cost of buying and owning a home in the U.S. has increased dramatically, especially over the past five years.
In 2006, the median price of a single-family home was $221,923, about $343,806 in 2024 when adjusted for inflation. Last year, however, the median sale price was $410,100, more than $66,000 higher in real terms than the 2006 equivalent.
Has the cost of housing weighed on your—or your family members’—decision to have children? Contact g.carbonaro@newsweek.com to share your experience.
During this same time frame, birth rates have plummeted across the nation. Housing experts believe that sky-high home prices and historically elevated borrowing costs may have contributed.
“Different people have different ideas about what they need to have achieved before having children, whether that’s finishing their education, making a certain amount of money, or being married to their partner,” Root said. “For many people, the list includes owning a home. This could be because of the uncertainty of renting, or because they feel they don’t have enough space for a child—either because they rent a small space, or because they still live with family, which is becoming increasingly common.”
“Larger homes that can comfortably accommodate multiple children have become increasingly out of reach for many families,” Hannah Jones, a senior economic research analyst at Realtor.com, said in the report. “As prices have far outpaced wage growth, couples may delay homeownership or remain in smaller homes longer, limiting the space available for growing families.”
How Have Housing Costs Affected Family Formation?
It is difficult to prove a direct connection between home prices and birth rates because of the limited data available, but experts have found signs that there could be a relationship.
“A big factor is that we know people often move when they have big life events like getting married or having a child,” Root said. “Given that, it seems like it’s probably true at the local level that the housing market affects births—just looking at correlations between local birth rates and overall cost of living, it’s clear that there’s a relationship, and we can speculate that that’s because people who are planning to have a child tend to move to areas that have lower cost of living, more housing available, etc.”
In a 2011 research paper about the real estate market’s effect on the decision to have a baby, authors Lisa Dettling and Melissa Schettini Kearney concluded that short-term increases in home prices led to a decline in birth rates among non-homeowners and an increase among homeowners.
Their estimates suggest that a $10,000 increase in home prices leads to a 5 percent increase in fertility rates among homeowners and a 2.4 percent decrease among non-homeowners.
A 2024 study analyzing data between 1870 and 2012 found that a 10 percent increase in house prices was associated with 0.01 to 0.03 fewer births per woman, with housing costs’ effects on fertility being comparable to that of increased education for women.
While acknowledging that there is “no single perfect strategy for addressing the remaining concerns in estimating the causal effect of house prices on fertility,” author Li Wenchao found that the “remarkable consistency of the negative and significant association across various approaches” shows that increases in house prices are “at least in part, responsible for the global decline in fertility.”
Americans who struggled to step onto the property ladder in recent years have experienced these dynamics first hand. Des Moines resident Jacob Hardigree, 33, was among the many millennials interviewed by Newsweek in July about the wave of young people moving back to the Midwest to buy homes and start families. His move was of crucial importance in his decision to have a child.
With his wife, he relocated from Bozeman, Montana, to Des Moines, Iowa, seeking more affordable housing and a cheaper cost of living. “When we moved here, we ended up making the same money as back West and now make more, so buying our home was pretty hassle-free,” Hardigree told Newsweek. “Now we have a child—which we also would have never done in Bozeman.”
Falling birth rates, a phenomenon that is occurring in countries around the world, are a concern to experts and policymakers as they raise the prospect of an aging population that won’t be supported by younger generations—putting an added strain on public services such as health care and social care—and won’t be able to boost economic growth.
“The effect of falling birth rates on the country is a complex question—it depends how much of the fall is fertility delay versus people having fewer children over the course of their lives, how steep the decline is, and what the social and policy response is,” Root said.
“Connecting it with housing prices, we can say that the effect of birth rate changes might be modest in the country overall, but much more noticeable in certain places. Cities with perpetual housing shortages and high housing costs might find themselves facing a much bigger and faster negative population change that will require bigger policy responses to adapt to.”
Margaret Anne McConnell, a global health economics professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, recently told Newsweek that to address the growing concerns, we first need to understand the societal and economic changes that have brought more Americans to decide against having children.
“I think the way to orient this is also to ask, ‘Why don’t people want to have children in our societies,’ and listen to their answers?” she said. “Some of what has been tried hasn’t worked, but I do think it would be really valuable to understand more what it is that makes people decide that having a larger family within the society they’re living in is not something they would want. And understanding that and addressing that would probably make everyone in society somewhat better off and more thriving,” she added.
McConnell continued: “I think the framing should be, ‘How to think about creating structures and supports that make people want to have children.’ But I think that’s proved to be quite challenging.”