Housing and fertility: what the data say

A question that keeps coming back

Birth rates have fallen across most of the developed world. In the European Union, the total fertility rate reached a record low of 1.38 children per woman in 2023, according to Eurostat. In France, long the exception, it fell to 1.56 in 2025, its lowest level since the end of the First World War, with 645,000 births, 24% fewer than in 2010 (INSEE, Bilan démographique 2025). Our article on Europe's falling birth rates sets out these figures in detail.

Among the explanations people give, the cost and size of housing is one of the most frequent. It is easy to see why. Having a child usually means needing more space, often a second bedroom, at exactly the age when incomes are lowest relative to housing costs. A couple renting a one-bedroom flat in a large city may face a choice between moving further out, paying much more, or waiting.

That last option, waiting, is where housing and fertility meet most directly. The question for researchers is whether housing costs change how many children people have, or only when they have them, and whether the effect is the same for everyone. Anyone who has compared the price of a two-bedroom flat with a one-bedroom flat in the same neighbourhood knows the gap can be large: the step up in space is often the most expensive step in a housing career, and it tends to arrive at the same moment as the wish for a first or second child.

The big picture: OECD countries

The OECD looked at this across its member countries in Society at a Glance 2024, which devoted a chapter to fertility (OECD, Society at a Glance 2024). The report notes that the average total fertility rate across OECD countries fell to 1.5 children per woman in 2022, and that concerns about the cost of housing have come to the fore as a barrier to having children, or more children. Housing costs, it observes, have risen considerably in most OECD countries since the late 1990s.

In regressions across countries and years, the OECD found a clear negative association between fertility rates and housing costs, as well as with unemployment. Higher fertility was associated with the employment of both men and women and with public spending on parental leave and early childhood care.

An association across countries is a starting point, not a proof. Countries with expensive housing may differ from others in many ways: urbanisation, education, working hours, the age at which people leave home. To get closer to cause, researchers have looked at what happens to the same kinds of people when housing prices change.

Owners and renters react in opposite directions

The most informative studies separate homeowners from renters, because a rise in house prices affects them in opposite ways. For an owner, rising prices increase wealth. For a renter, they make the next step, buying or renting a larger home, more expensive.

In the United States, Lisa Dettling and Melissa Kearney studied births across metropolitan areas as house prices rose and fell (Dettling L. J. and Kearney M. S., "House prices and birth rates: the impact of the real estate market on the decision to have a baby", Journal of Public Economics, 2014). In the published version, a $10,000 increase in local house prices was associated with a 5% increase in fertility rates among owners and a 2.4% decrease among non-owners. Given the share of owners in the US, the net effect of rising prices was slightly positive. The authors attribute the owner effect to home equity.

A second US study followed individual families over time (Lovenheim M. F. and Mumford K. J., "Do family wealth shocks affect fertility choices? Evidence from the housing market", Review of Economics and Statistics, 2013). Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, it found that a $100,000 increase in housing wealth among homeowners led to a 16% to 18% increase in the probability of having a child. It found no detectable effect of local price growth on renters' fertility.

England: rising prices, fewer births among renters

For England, the economist Cevat Giray Aksoy used county data and planning restrictions, which limit how much housing can be built, to isolate the effect of prices (Aksoy C. G., "Short-term effects of house prices on birth rates", EBRD Working Paper No. 192, 2016). He estimated that a 10% rise in house prices was associated with a 2.8% rise in births among owners and a 4.9% fall among renters. Weighted by the share of owners, the net effect was a 1.3% fall in birth rates. The fall among renters was concentrated among women aged 20 to 29, which suggests that young renters postpone having children until they can move up the housing ladder.

The contrast with the US result is instructive. Where more households own their homes and housing wealth rises, higher prices can raise births on balance. Where a larger share of young adults rent, and prices are pushed up by limited supply, the same price rise lowers them.

It is not only price: access to ownership

Clara Mulder and Francesco Billari compared Western countries by the share of owner-occupied housing and how easy it is to get a mortgage (Mulder C. H. and Billari F. C., "Homeownership regimes and low fertility", Housing Studies 25(4), 2010). They found the lowest fertility in what they called the "difficult" regime: countries where owning is the norm but mortgages are hard to obtain, so young adults struggle to enter the market. Southern European countries, which combine high ownership with late home-leaving, fit this pattern.

And space?

A newer line of research looks at the size of homes rather than their price. Analyses of US census data report that fertility is markedly lower in homes with one or two bedrooms than in homes with three, and that crowding, measured as people per bedroom, matters more than the type of building (Stone L., Institute for Family Studies, research brief, June 2024). These are cross-sectional associations: people who want larger families may choose larger homes, so the direction of cause is hard to establish. They are consistent, though, with what surveys of people planning children report.

What the evidence adds up to

• Housing costs and fertility are linked, both across countries and, more convincingly, within countries when prices change.
• The effect depends on tenure. Rising prices tend to raise births among owners and lower them among renters. The net effect depends on how many young adults rent.
• Much of the effect is about timing. Renters, especially in their twenties, appear to postpone births. Postponement can become fewer births overall, because fertility declines with age.
• Access matters as well as price. Where entering the housing market is hard, fertility tends to be lowest.
• Housing is one factor among several. The OECD analysis points equally to employment, parental leave and childcare.

The limits of the research

Studies of this kind are observational: they cannot randomly assign house prices. The best of them use natural variation, such as planning restrictions or regional price cycles, to get closer to a causal estimate, but each rests on assumptions. Results also differ by country, period and housing system, so a figure from the US in the 2000s should not be applied directly to Paris or Madrid today. Our guide to reading a study critically explains why these distinctions matter.

Why it matters for the age at first birth

Postponement links housing to biology. The mean age of women at the birth of their first child in the EU rose from 28.8 years in 2013 to 29.8 in 2023, according to Eurostat (Eurostat, Fertility statistics). Every year of delay matters more after the mid-thirties, when the chance of conceiving falls and the success rates of fertility treatment decline. Housing that allows people to form families when they want to is therefore not only a social question; it is also, indirectly, a question of reproductive health.

For policy makers, the research suggests that measures aimed only at births, such as one-off payments, address the outcome rather than one of its causes. Measures that make it easier for young adults to rent or buy a home with room for a child, build more family-sized homes, or reach ownership earlier, act further upstream. The OECD's cross-country work points in the same direction, alongside employment security and childcare.

Questions the research has not settled

Several important questions remain open. Researchers do not yet know how much of the effect of housing on the timing of births eventually becomes a lasting reduction in the number of children, because that requires following people to the end of their reproductive years. They know less about the effect of rents than of purchase prices, even though renting is the norm for young adults in many cities. And most of the strongest studies come from the United States and the United Kingdom, whose housing markets differ from those of continental Europe.

There is also a question of direction. People who plan to have children may move to cheaper areas or larger homes in advance, which can make the relationship between housing and births look different depending on the geographical scale of the analysis. Studies that follow the same individuals over time, as the US panel study did, are better placed to deal with this, and more such studies for European countries would be valuable.

What is already clear is that housing belongs in any serious discussion of falling birth rates, alongside employment and family policy. As the age at first birth continues to rise, discussed in why people have children later, the timing of access to suitable housing is likely to remain part of the story.