A newborn nursery. Photo: Jiji Press
The annual number hit a record low for the 10th consecutive year.
The total fertility rate, which indicates the average number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime, also fell to a record low, at 1.14.
While intensively implementing countermeasures under its child future strategy, the government launched the Population Strategy Headquarters in November last year to serve as a control tower to deal with population decline.
Even so, the declining birthrate is progressing about 15 years faster than projections from the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
“The population decline is related to a drop in the number of young women, late marriage and late childbirth,” a ministry official said, adding that the ministry is taking the situation seriously.
The number of births has been on a downward trend since 1975, falling below one million in 2016. The number slipped below 700,000 for the first time in 2024.
The rate of decline has been above 5 pct since 2022 but slowed to 2.2 pct in the latest reporting year. Births increased in Tokyo as well as Toyama, Ishikawa, and Kagawa prefectures.
The country’s total fertility rate fell 0.01 percentage point from the previous year, marking the 10th consecutive year of decline.
By prefecture, rates tended to be higher in the western part of Japan, with increases in 13 of the country’s 47 prefectures.
The fertility rate was highest in Okinawa, at 1.52, followed by Miyazaki, at 1.46, and Fukui, at 1.45.
Tokyo had the lowest rate, at 0.96, below one for the third consecutive year.
Hokkaido and Miyagi followed, with rates of 1.00 each.
The number of couples who got married increased for the second consecutive year in 2025, to 489,119, up by 4,027 from the previous year, but still below the pre-pandemic level of about 599,000 in 2019.
The number of couples who got divorced slipped to 179,068.
The average age at first marriage was 31.0 for men and 29.7 for women.
The average age of mothers at the birth of their first child was 31.0.
The annual number of deaths was 1,589,489, posting the first decrease in five years.
This marked the 19th consecutive year in which deaths exceeded births, resulting in a natural population decrease of 918,253.
