By Jihoon Lee
SEOUL, Feb 25 (Reuters) – South Korea’s birthrate rose for a second straight year in 2025, government data showed on Wednesday, in a further sign that a country facing a demographic crisis for nearly a decade may be starting to turn a corner.
South Korea’s total fertility rate, the average number of babies a woman is expected to have during her reproductive life, stood at 0.80 in 2025, up from 0.75 in 2024, according to preliminary data from the Ministry of Data and Statistics.
New births began rebounding in 2024 on a post-pandemic boost and government policies, after eight consecutive years of declines that saw South Korea register the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.72 in 2023, a period marked by sky-rocketing house prices and higher economic participation by women.
There were 5.0 new births per 1,000 people in 2025, up from 4.7 in 2024. That compared with 5.6 in China last year, 4.6 in Taiwan last year and 5.7 in Japan in 2024, where the trend remains downwards.
The pace of the rebound is faster than the government’s optimistic-case projection of 0.75 in 2025 and 0.80 in 2026, which forecasts the total fertility rate to break above 1.0 per woman in 2031.
Marriages, a leading indicator of new births with a lag of one to two years, rose 8.1% in 2025, after a record 14.8% jump in 2024.
“The biggest part is that marriages are increasing a lot, accumulatively,” Park Hyun-jung, a ministry official, told a briefing, noting a higher number of people in their 30s and shifts in social attitudes.
The sharpest rise in new births was in the capital, with Seoul’s fertility rate at 0.63, up 8.9% from 0.58 in 2024, though still the lowest across the country.
Shin Kyung-ah, a sociology professor at Hallym University, said the data needed more scrutiny because of statistical effects such as population composition changes.
“Still, it is meaningful as an indicator suggesting positive changes, which will, at least indirectly, also help make people become more positive about having a baby,” Shin said.
In a biennial government survey in 2024, 52.5% of South Koreans expressed positive views about marriage, up from 50.1% in 2022. The average number of children people ideally wanted to have stood at 1.89.
Last year, new births rose 6.8% to 254,457, the biggest percentage rise since 2007, while deaths rose 1.3% to 363,389, resulting in the population naturally shrinking for the sixth consecutive year.
ECONOMIC SHOCK
President Lee Jae Myung’s administration plans a five-year policy roadmap this year to respond to demographic changes, amid concern about an economic shock from an ageing population.
It also plans to expand policy support rolled out in recent years for childbirth, and to introduce measures to attract skilled foreign workers to offset a shrinking workforce.
“The government will further strengthen support for young people in their 20s and early 30s, low-income earners and the unemployed,” the Presidential Committee on Ageing Society and Population Policy said last month, citing evidence policy efforts were bearing fruit.
South Korea’s potential economic growth rate, estimated at around an annual rate of 2%, fell by six percentage points in the last three decades, more sharply than in most major economies, and is expected to drop to 0.6% by 2045-2049, according to the central bank.
Credit ratings agencies warn of growing strains on public finances from welfare expenditure. The country’s public pension fund, the world’s third-largest with $1 trillion in assets, is projected to run out by 2071.
President Lee has called for regional cooperation on demographic challenges and proposed at last year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit to hold the group’s first population policy forum in South Korea this year.
During visits to China and Japan in January, Lee also agreed with President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to seek collaboration on ageing populations.
South Korea’s population of 51.8 million is expected to shrink by almost a third to 36.2 million by 2072, according to the latest government projection in 2022.
(Reporting by Jihoon LeeEditing by Ed Davies and Lincoln Feast.)
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