Main findings
- Eleven years of decline in a row: births have fallen every single year since 2014, with no recovery after any shock.
- First babies fell by almost half. Fourth and later babies did not fall at all.
- A thin generation is coming of age, so births will keep falling for a while.
In 2014, 60,635 babies were born in Georgia. In 2025, 37,867: 22,768 fewer in a single year, about 62 fewer every day. That is not an abstract number. It is the size of whole towns and villages.
Where would the missing babies have lived?
Three explanations are heard most often: people are too poor, everyone is leaving, young people no longer want children. Each holds some truth, yet none explains why births have fallen while the economy has grown. In a country where family still comes first, young Georgians have not given up on it. They are starting it later. Many now study first: the share of young women at university almost doubled in ten years. Women now marry for the first time at about 30, three and a half years later than in 2014. Part of this waiting is a free choice. Another part comes from uncertainty: not knowing whether there will be a steady job next year, a flat within reach, or a country stable enough to plan a family in. A wedding, a mortgage and a first child shape the next decades of a life, and people take these steps when the years ahead look clear enough.
Babies born per year, Georgia
Number of babies born.
1994-2007
The dark nineties. Independence brought civil war, wars in the Tskhinvali region (1991-1992) and Abkhazia (1992-1993) that left Abkhazia and most of the Tskhinvali region outside Georgian control, and an economic collapse in which GDP fell by more than half. Many families lost the life savings they had kept in Soviet banks, and only part of them was ever paid back. The coupon, a temporary currency introduced in 1993, lost its value so fast that in 1995 one new lari replaced a million coupons. Georgia was learning to run a state of its own, and the period ended only with the Rose Revolution of 2003. Births drifted down to about 45,000 in 2002.
2007-2014
When the economy grew, families grew too. The economy grew fast and weddings more than doubled between 2004 and 2010. Not even the August 2008 war with Russia and the 2009 recession (GDP fell by 3.7%) stopped it. In October 2007 Patriarch Ilia II had promised to baptise personally every third and later child of married parents, and third births rose by 58% from 2007 to 2013.
After the 2009 peak, births slipped back. The whole fall was in first babies: down by a quarter by 2013, while second and third babies rose. Women were marrying later, and the small generation born in the 1990s was reaching the age of a first child.
The church campaign's true effect is hard to measure, and the studies disagree: one finds a large rise in third and later births, together with more marriages (Chung et al., 2025), while another finds no clear effect (Lanchava, 2014).
2014-2025
Eleven years of decline. Since the 2014 peak, births have fallen every single year. 2025 is the lowest figure in the whole series.
Look inside the fall
Split the births by whether the baby is a mother's first, second, third or later child, and set 2014 to 100.
First births: −47%. Fourth and later: up. Georgia is not losing its big families. It is losing families that start later, or not at all.
If people simply wanted fewer children, the third and fourth babies would be expected to disappear first. Instead, the first child is missing. That is what you see when people delay the start of family life. And when a start is delayed long enough, some families never start at all.
There is a second, slower force. People now in their twenties were born in the low-birth years around 1996-2006, and many have emigrated. According to Geostat, on 1 January 2026 there were about 435,000 people in their twenties, against 570,000 in their thirties. As this thin generation reaches the ages when most babies are born, births will keep falling for a while even if each woman has as many children as today.
The pinched waist: Georgia's twenties are a thin generation
Thousands of people in each 5-year age group, 1 January. The dashed outline shows 1994.
Look at the shape. In 1994 it still looked like a pyramid: the widest bar was children aged 10-14, and the bars grew narrower towards the top. Today the widest bar is people aged 35-39, and there are more Georgians aged 60-64 (246,000) than children under five (204,000). In 1994 Georgia had more than twice as many children under 15 as people over 65. Today the two groups are almost the same size: about 750,000 children and 713,000 people aged 65 and over. A pyramid that is wide in the middle and narrow at the bottom tells you what comes next: fewer parents, fewer babies, and more people to support with every passing year.