Young women in the United States are choosing not to have children in numbers that demographers have not recorded in generations – and the data documenting this change are growing sharper and more specific by the year. The question of whether to have children has always carried personal weight, but something has changed in the scope of the answer. A striking and growing proportion of young women without children are not saying “not yet.” They are saying no, and meaning it.
This is not a story about women who are waiting longer, though that is also true. The average age of mothers at first birth has continued to rise, now sitting at 27½ years, up from 21½ in the early 1970s. But the data now go well beyond postponement. Among younger women without children, a striking proportion report that they have no intention of ever becoming mothers – a change that separates this moment from anything recorded in previous decades of fertility research.
What is driving this? The honest answer is: several things at once, none of them simple. Economic pressure, changing cultural expectations, a recalibration of what a fulfilled life looks like, and a frank reckoning with the practical costs of raising children in 2026 are all converging at the same moment. Understanding the scale and the drivers of this trend matters – for policymakers, for families, and for the millions of women navigating these choices right now.
The Scale of the Change
Research from the University of New Hampshire reports that in 2024 there were 5.7 million more childless women of prime child-bearing age than expected given prior patterns – a significant jump from 2.1 million in 2016 and 4.7 million in 2022. To put that in concrete terms: this is not a rounding error or a statistical blip. This change in fertility patterns has contributed to 11.8 million fewer births than expected over the past 17 years.
Childless rates increased the most among women under 30, where fertility rate declines were also greatest, according to Kenneth Johnson, professor of sociology and senior demographer at UNH’s Carsey School of Public Policy. In 2024, there were four million more women aged 20 – 39 than in 2006, but seven million fewer have given birth – an increase of 45 percent.
This tracks with a parallel finding on intentions, not just outcomes. A study by Michigan State University published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that the share of nonparents who don’t want any children nearly doubled, rising from 14 percent in 2002 to 29 percent in 2023. At the same time, the share of nonparents who plan to have kids dropped from 79 percent to 59 percent. The research, based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth, tracked over 80,000 adults across seven survey waves from 2002 to 2023.
Earlier National Survey of Family Growth data shows just how rapid this change has been. Data from the 2013 – 2015 survey cycle showed that 12 percent of childless women aged 20 – 24 and 20 percent of childless women aged 25 – 29 expected no children – already up from 9 percent and 12 percent respectively in 1988. The 2023 figures represent a further, more dramatic acceleration of a trend that has been building for decades.
The Intentions Gap: Childfree vs. Childless
Before interpreting these numbers, one distinction matters enormously in the research literature: the difference between women who are childfree (meaning they actively do not want children) and women who are childless (meaning they want children but circumstances have not allowed for them). The two groups are often conflated in public discourse, but their experiences and motivations diverge sharply.
Researchers define childfree adults as those who do not want to have children, making them distinct from parents and other adults without children. Prevalence estimates from representative U.S. samples suggest that childfree adults comprise over one-fifth of the population, though those estimates vary considerably depending on how questions are framed and which age groups are studied.
The share of U.S. adults younger than 50 without children who say they are unlikely to ever have children rose from 37 percent in 2018 to 47 percent in 2023, according to the Pew Research Center. That is nearly half of all childless adults under 50 – a cohort that has grown considerably – saying parenthood is not in their future.
What makes this finding particularly significant is the age distribution within it. Women in their 20s are expressing these intentions during what has historically been the period when young adults hedge, defer, and remain uncommitted on the question of children. The fact that so many younger women are now offering firm “no” answers rather than “not yet” answers represents a qualitative change in how the decision to remain childfree is being framed.
What’s Behind the Numbers
The most frequently cited driver of the childfree trend is economic, and the data make a compelling case. The U.S. fertility rate reached a record low in 2024, with the average American woman between ages 15 and 44 giving birth to fewer than two children. As one Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researcher put it, “The economy, job insecurity, housing insecurity, the cost of child care – these are all rapidly increasing, and people are feeling uncertain about their future and their ability to support a child.”
Childcare costs are one concrete expression of this pressure. According to the National Database of Childcare Prices, U.S. families spend between 8.9 percent and 16 percent of their median income on full-day care for just one child, with annual costs ranging from $6,552 to $15,600 as of 2022.
Housing is another compounding factor. A report from Redfin reveals that homeownership rates for Gen Z flatlined in 2024 – just 26.1 percent of Gen Zers owned their home last year. Since mortgage rates began rising in 2022, jumping from about 3 percent to 7 percent, housing affordability has plummeted, and by spring 2024 the typical monthly payment for a new home hit a record $2,800. Raising a family assumes a stable foundation, and for large numbers of young women, that foundation remains out of reach.
The Intentions-Reality Gap
One of the more striking aspects of the current data is what researchers describe as an “intentions gap” – a persistent divergence between how many children Americans say they’d like to have and how many they actually have. Even as the U.S. birth rate has fallen to an all-time low of 1.6 births per woman, Gallup’s September 2025 polling found that Americans continue to say the ideal family size includes an average of 2.7 children. In recent decades, the divergence between the ideal and reality has become especially wide as the fertility rate has dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman.
Gallup’s analysis suggests that the decline in births may be driven more by practical challenges that make it harder for people to have as many children as they want, rather than by changing attitudes about the ideal family size. High costs for housing, child care, healthcare and higher education, coupled with delayed marriage and parenthood, birth control and declining religiosity, are likely among the factors holding down birth rates despite a continued preference for more children.
Among focus group participants whose ideal number of children had changed, almost all said it had decreased, citing lack of affordability, experiences with difficult pregnancies and deliveries, and wariness about the state of the world. Among women under 50, 39 percent have the same number of children as their desired number, while 45 percent have fewer than they desire.
This last figure deserves careful attention. A significant portion of the rise in childless and childfree women is not the result of women freely choosing lives without children. Many of them wanted children but found the conditions – economic, relational, structural – unavailable to them. The childfree category, as a lived experience, contains far more complexity than a simple preference statement can convey.
The Planning Horizon Narrows
A Pew Research Center analysis of National Survey of Family Growth data found that Americans in their 20s and 30s are planning to have fewer children than a decade ago – the total number of children that women and men ages 20 to 39 planned to have, on average, dropped from 2.3 in 2012 to 1.8 in 2023. These declines in the number of children adults plan to have occurred almost entirely in the last decade.
In 2023, the total number of children that men and women ages 20 to 39 planned to have fell below 2.1 – the figure that represents the average number of children per woman that a population needs to sustain itself from one generation to the next without relying on immigration.
Women with a four-year college degree plan to have fewer children than women without a four-year degree, according to the same analysis. This pattern tracks with broader findings that higher educational attainment, particularly for women, correlates with lower fertility intentions – though the causal relationship is complex and runs in multiple directions.
Stigma, Agency, and Social Change
The economics alone don’t account for all of what’s happening. Cultural change is part of the picture, too. In the past, women who could have been inclined to remain child-free might have given birth anyway because society expected it. In recent decades, though, those norms have changed. “We’re having more conversations about the reality that parenthood is an option, not something that everybody has to do,” noted Amy Blackstone, a sociologist at the University of Maine and author of Childfree by Choice.
Even so, women who choose to remain child-free say they still feel like they constantly have to explain their choices to others. They’ve been called selfish, accused of hating kids, and told they’ll regret their decision later in life. The social acceptability of the choice may be increasing, but social pressure has not disappeared. It has simply changed shape – from direct prohibition to persistent questioning.
Concerns about climate change and the environment also weigh on young people’s decisions, according to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers. In a 2025 population survey, concern over the state of the world was cited as having a major impact on the ability or decision to have children by 35 percent of respondents – the single largest factor cited.
This combination of economic and ideological factors distinguishes the current moment from earlier periods of declining fertility. Previous generations may have delayed parenthood due to economic downturns, with the expectation of resuming normal family formation patterns once conditions improved. The data now suggest a different dynamic: a reconfiguring of the expectation itself.
The Policy Response and Its Limits
The Trump administration has been evaluating ways to incentivize more Americans to get married and have more children amid declining birth rates. Among those incentives reportedly under consideration is a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery – an idea President Trump reportedly endorsed.
Whether such policies can meaningfully alter the trajectory is an open question. Reasons for the decline in fertility rates include access to modern contraception and education for women, higher costs of living and childcare expenses, and government policies around family planning. Though some countries have tried to slow or reverse the trend through pro-natal policies – including cash incentives and tax breaks for childbearing, affordable childcare, and longer parental leaves – their long-term success has not been definitively proved so far.
The research suggests that the gap between desired and actual family size is the more tractable policy problem. If many women are having fewer children than they want because of structural barriers – unaffordable housing, prohibitive childcare costs, inadequate parental leave – then policy interventions that address those barriers could theoretically move the needle. The ideal scenario, according to Johns Hopkins researchers, is one that helps people have as many or as few children as they want – “through the equitable distribution of resources, reducing the cost of living, and making sure that people have access to high quality reproductive care.” As one researcher noted, “If people are able to achieve what they want, we would probably be right around replacement level fertility.”
The harder question is what to do about the portion of the trend that is not a gap but a genuine preference: women who have evaluated the question, considered their lives, and concluded that they do not want children. Policy has a limited reach there, and the history of governments attempting to pressure or penalize women into particular reproductive choices is not encouraging.
What the Data Actually Tells Us
The data on women’s childbearing intentions and outcomes in 2026 do not tell a single story. They tell several overlapping ones, and conflating them leads to both poor policy and poor public understanding.
The most important finding is the acceleration of the trend. The share of women – especially younger women – who report no intention to have children has grown substantially and rapidly over the past two decades, with the sharpest movement happening since 2012. The causes are multiple: the structural costs of raising children in a high-housing-cost, high-childcare-cost economy; a genuine cultural recalibration of what adult life is expected to look like; and, for some women, a deliberate and settled personal choice that no amount of cash bonuses is likely to change.
A second key finding is the intentions-reality gap – the persistent mismatch between how many children Americans say they’d like to have and how many they actually have. For this group, the childfree designation is not accurate. These are women who wanted children but could not access the conditions – financial stability, a partner, affordable housing, reliable childcare – that would have made it possible. Their situation calls for structural support, not policy lectures about the importance of procreation.
The trend is unlikely to reverse quickly. Demographic momentum works slowly in both directions. What the data indicate is that the United States is in the early stages of a long-term recalibration of family formation patterns – one that will have consequences for economic productivity, social insurance systems, and the texture of American community life that researchers are only beginning to model. The most useful response is an honest account of what is actually driving these changes, and a willingness to address the structural barriers that are keeping women from achieving the family lives they themselves want.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.