Malta's fertility rate has decreased to 1.01 live births per woman, a Eurostat survey has found.

A Eurostat survey published this month revealed that in 2024, Malta's fertility rate continued to decline. In 2023, the national fertility rate stood at 1.06 live births per woman. This latest survey, featuring data from the following year, shows that Malta has retained the lowest fertility rate among all EU countries.

Ten years prior, in 2014, Malta's fertility rate stood at 1.38 live births per woman. Around the start of the millennium, when this data for Malta was first recorded, in 2001, Malta's national fertility rate was reportedly 1.48. In 1990, 34 years prior, Malta's fertility rate was double Eurostat's latest observations in 2024, at 2.02 live births per woman.

Following Malta, Spain (1.10 live births) and Lithuania (1.11 live births) recorded the lowest total fertility rates within the EU-27. From the other end of the spectrum, Bulgaria reported the highest total fertility rate in 2024, with 1.72 live births per woman, followed by France (1.61) and Slovenia (1.52).

The fertility rate across the EU as a whole went down from 1.38 live births per woman to 1.34 in the span of a year.

The total fertility rate dropped in 24 out of the 27 EU countries; it remained stable in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, while Slovenia was the only EU country to observe a higher fertility rate between 2023 (1.51 live births) and 2024 (1.52 live births). This shows that the reduction in newborn children is a trend across the entire continent, especially as the difference between the highest and the lowest rates continues to converge.

In 2024, the total number of live births amount to 3.55 million children born in the European Union.

Eurostat data also shows that in Malta and the EU overall, women are becoming mothers later in life.

According to the findings, the mean age of women in Malta at the birth of their first child is now 29.9 years old and continues to gradually trend upwards. The mean age for women at childbirth in Malta, in general, is now 31.3 years old. For the EU overall, coincidentally, the mean ages for both marks are the same.

Looking at data across the EU by age brackets, Eurostat has found that fertility rates are highest among 30-34-year-olds. Fertility rates for all women below the age of 30 have been declining since 2004, while fertility rates for all women aged 35 and over have been on the rise.

In 2024, 53.9% of all children born in Malta were first-born children - the third highest mark in the EU, only trailing Luxembourg (53.9%) and Portugal (54.6%). Moreover, just under a third of all newborns in Malta (32.4%) were the second child in their family, 9% were the third child, and 4.7% were the fourth or subsequent child.

62% of all live births in Malta came from native-born mothers while the remaining 38% stemmed from foreign-born mothers. This is the third highest proportion of foreign-born mothers from all EU countries in 2024. Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and Germany all had at least one third of all children born within their borders to foreign-born mothers.

Notably, Eurostat highlighted that since 2013, Malta recorded the largest increase in live births from foreign-born mothers, from 11% of all live births up to 38% (up 27 percentage points). The proportion of live births from foreign-born mothers has been on the rise across most European countries, according to the data.