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For eight straight years, every annual fertility report out of South Korea told some version of the same story: lower than the year before. That streak broke in 2024, and on Feb. 25, 2026, the National Data Processing Agency’s (국가데이터처) population trends division confirmed it happened again in 2025. Whether two good years undo a decade of collapse, or just describe a temporary bump inside a still-shrinking country, is a question the agency’s own director declined to answer with confidence — even while presenting the numbers that prompted it.
The case this is a real turnaround
South Korea recorded 254,500 births in 2025, up 16,100 from 2024 — a 6.8% increase that division director Park Hyun-jung (박현정) called the largest one-year jump since 2010, and, by annual growth rate, the fourth-highest since record-keeping began in 1970. The total fertility rate climbed to 0.80, up from 0.75 in 2024, putting it back above 0.8 for the first time since 2021, according to the briefing. Births rose across every maternal age group 20 and older, and first births specifically — children born to mothers having their first child — rose 8.6% to 158,700, now 62.4% of all births.
Park attributed the rise mainly to a three-year run of rising marriages, partly a backlog of weddings delayed by the pandemic, plus a growing pool of women in their early 30s (the peak childbearing years) and a measurable shift in attitudes: in the agency’s biennial social survey, the share of respondents who said they’d want children after marriage rose 3.1 percentage points between 2022 and 2024, and willingness to have children outside marriage rose 2.5 points over the same period. Under the agency’s high-fertility population projection scenario, Park noted, the total fertility rate isn’t expected to reach 1.0 until 2031 — and 2025’s actual rate of 0.80 already exceeded that scenario’s projection for the year, meaning the real trend is running roughly a year ahead of the optimistic case.
The case this is a temporary bump
Even with two consecutive increases, 0.80 remains far below the 2.1 needed to hold a population steady, and South Korea’s population kept shrinking in absolute terms: the country recorded 363,400 deaths against 254,500 births in 2025, a natural decrease of 108,900 people — continuing a decline that began in 2020. Sixteen of the country’s 17 regions posted a natural population decrease in 2025; only Sejong added more residents through births than it lost through deaths. The gap between regions was stark on the fertility side too — Seoul’s total fertility rate was just 0.63, the lowest in the country, against 1.1 in Jeollanam-do.
Asked directly whether government policy drove the rebound, Park said the agency “can’t clearly establish a causal link,” attributing the increase instead to the marriage backlog and the temporary bulge in the early-30s population. That bulge has a known expiration date: pressed on when the underlying population of women in their early 30s would start shrinking again, Park confirmed the agency’s projections put that turn in 2027 — the same cohort effect she’d just credited as a key driver of the 2025 increase.
What the agency itself won’t yet say
Asked point-blank whether the total fertility rate would keep climbing in 2026 or might fall back, Park didn’t offer a number, noting that marriage data — already up 8.9% in 2025 after a 14.8% jump in 2024 — would need to be watched month by month, and that updated population projections based on 2025 data won’t be ready until later this year. She did note that the typical lag between a marriage and a birth runs about two years, which, given three straight years of rising marriages, gives the country “reason to view the trend positively” through roughly 2027 — almost exactly when the early-30s population bulge that has been doing much of the work is projected to start reversing.
Sources: National Data Processing Agency (국가데이터처), “2025년 출생·사망통계(잠정)” [“2025 Provisional Birth and Death Statistics”], briefing by Population Trends Division Director Park Hyun-jung, published via the Republic of Korea Policy Briefing (Korea.kr) (Feb. 25, 2026).
