Baby recession deepens in Australia’s biggest cities amid cost-of-living crisis, preliminary data shows

Outer-suburban and regional Australians increasingly likely to give birth to more children per person than inner-city residents, report shows

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Baby recessions in Australia's biggest cities deepened in 2024 amid sustained cost-of-living pressures, dragging the nation's birthrate to a near-record low in 2024.

Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane each saw further declines in the number of children born per woman from 2023 to 2024, according to KPMG's preliminary analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics population data, barely offset by increases in Perth and in regional Australia.

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