Costa News Spain Breaking News | English News in Spain.
Thursday, 20 February, 2025 at 23:05
For the first time since a decade, Spain saw an increase in births last year. According to the INE, Spain’s national statistics institute, there were 322,034 babies in 2024. This is 1,378 extra babies than a year earlier.
In 2024, the country managed, for the first time in 16-years, to break the trend that saw the birthrate constantly decline. The trend started in 2008, when the economic and financial crisis triggered a’shock,’ resulting in increased family hardships and a slowdown in immigration for many years. In some cases, more people returned to their home countries than arrived. In 2014, there was a similar slight increase to the current trend.
The arrival of millions of immigrants during the last two-and-a-half years has coincided with a slight improvement in the birth rate. The influx of immigrants has led to an increase in population by over one hundred thousand since the end 2022. The population boost also allowed Spain to surpass the barrier of 49,000,000 inhabitants at Christmas last year.
In fact, immigration is the only factor that will allow Spain to grow its population, because despite a slight increase in births by 2024, Spain’s natural population (net population, which is the balance after subtracting births from deaths) is still negative. In Spain last year, 439,146 died, which is 3,000 more than one year before and many times more than the number born. This led to a decline of 114 937 people in the Spanish population without taking into consideration migration.
Madrid (4.7% increase) is one of only a few Spanish areas that experience an annual rise in births. Births in Spain fell sharply, however, especially in Galicia, where they dropped by 4.4%, and the Basque Country with a 3.7% decrease.
The most negative natural population balances occurred in Galicia, with a natural population decline of 19,333 inhabitants, in Castilla y León, with 16,385 more deaths than births, and in Catalonia, with a natural population decline of 13,668 persons.
The rise in older mothers
The INE data reveal a trend which has been gaining in strength as the century progresses, namely, the continual delay of the age at which women become mothers, contributing to the decline in births, and also the number of children a woman chooses to have.
The records from last year show that more than one woman in ten gives birth to a child aged 40 or older. In 2024 about 33,570 children were born to women of this age. This represents 10.4% all successful births. The trend of older mothers giving birth to more babies is increasing. In 2014, the number was 2,624 higher than it was a decade before.
Eight out of ten births in Spain are still carried out by women aged between 25-39, despite the trend of delaying motherhood. However, this has decreased by three and a quarter points over the last decade. Women under 25 do not make up even one in ten of the women who give birth in Spain. They represent 9,6%, which is more or less equal to ten years ago.
