Record low gap between births and deaths in S’pore poses demographic challenge

SINGAPORE – The gap between the number of births and deaths in Singapore has shrunk to its smallest in almost a century.

In 2025, just 3,365 more babies were born than the number of people who died, according to the Report on Registration of Births and Deaths 2025 released by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority on July 27.

The figure is a steep drop from a decade ago, when there were 22,323 more births than deaths in 2015.

Checks of the annual reports on registration of births and deaths by The Straits Times for data dating as far back as 1931 found that the natural increase of 3,365 people in 2025 is a historic low.

Annual births typically exceeded deaths by tens of thousands, with the highest at slightly above 52,000 in the late 1950s. Post-independence, that gap shrank to below 10,000 for the first time in 2022 and has continued to narrow since.

The natural increase in the population – the difference between the number of births and deaths – is closely watched as Singapore’s population would shrink without immigration when deaths outnumber births.

Signs of this are already emerging among the Chinese community here, which is the only ethnic group to record more deaths than births so far. 

In 2025, there were 3,071 more deaths than births among the Chinese, with 16,902 births and 19,973 deaths recorded.

The trend first appeared in 2022, when deaths exceeded births by 311, widening to 920 in 2023. It briefly reversed in 2024 – the Chinese Year of the Dragon, traditionally seen as an auspicious year for childbirth – when births exceeded deaths by 99, before slipping back into a deficit in 2025. 

In 2025, the Malay, Indian and Others ethnic groups continued to record natural increases of 3,006, 1,199 and 2,231, respectively.

The Malays had 6,725 births and 3,719 deaths in 2025. There were 3,427 births and 2,228 deaths among the Indians, and 2,810 births and 579 deaths for those in the Others category.

Shannon Ang, an assistant professor of sociology at the Nanyang Technological University, said one reason why there were more deaths than births among the Chinese in 2025 is that the Chinese have the lowest birth rate among the races. This is even as the crude birth rates fell for all races over the decades.

For example, the crude birth rate fell from 8.6 in 2015 to 5.3 in 2025 for the Chinese.

Over the same period, it fell from 13.3 to 11.8 among Malays, and from 10.9 to 7.3 for the Indians. The crude birth rate refers to the number of babies born per thousand people in the resident population.

On top of that, the number of Chinese babies born in 2025 fell by 15 per cent compared with 2024, Ang added.

The crude death rates for the Chinese and Malays are the same, at 6.3 per 1,000 people in the resident population in 2025. It was 5 for Indians and 2.3 for Others.

The narrowing gap comes as Singapore has been battling a longstanding baby drought, with the overall number of births in 2025 falling to its lowest in the Republic’s post-independence history.

A total of 29,864 babies across all races were born in 2025, an 11.4 per cent fall from 2024.

Meanwhile, as the population ages, the number of deaths continues to rise.

Deaths rose marginally by 0.2 per cent from 26,442 in 2024 to 26,499 in 2025.

Jean Yeung, director of social sciences at A*STAR Institute for Human Development and Potential, said that births have fallen “drastically” after the Covid-19 pandemic as fewer couples got married during that period and there are now fewer women of child-bearing age.  

On the other hand, a large number of baby boomers are now in their 70s and 80s, when mortality rates rise sharply, said Singapore University of Social Sciences economist Walter Theseira.

So this has led to the growing number of deaths, and coupled with the sharp fall in births, the gap between births and deaths has narrowed rapidly, he said.  

Tan Poh Lin, senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, said the “accelerated” narrowing of the gap between births and deaths marks a demographic transition in which, without immigration, Singapore’s population would begin to decline because the current generation is not having enough children to replace older generations.

The latest data comes after Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong said in February that births have fallen at an “unprecedented rate”, with the resident total fertility rate (TFR) hitting a record low of 0.87 in 2025.

The TFR refers to the average number of babies each woman would have during her reproductive years. 

Without new interventions, Singapore’s citizen population may start to shrink by the early 2040s, Gan said.

While the Government’s top priority is to continue supporting Singaporeans in forming families, Gan said a “carefully managed immigration flow” is needed to augment its low birth rate. 

Depending on demographic trends, the Government expects to take in between 25,000 and 30,000 new citizens a year over the next five years, higher than the average of 21,300 citizenships granted yearly between 2020 and 2024. 

About 40,000 people a year may become permanent residents in the next five years, he said. In 2025, around 35,000 people became PRs. 

Singapore is far from alone in facing these demographic pressures. 

Yeung, who is also a professor in the Department of Paediatrics at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Yin School of Medicine, said that 40 to 50 countries around the world have seen more deaths than births. In 2025, these countries included China, Italy and Japan.

The consequences of this include a smaller workforce, fewer people paying tax, fewer consumers, greater caregiving burden and potentially slower economic growth, Yeung said.

In addition, the emerging trend of deaths outstripping births among the Chinese also has a bearing on Singapore’s ethnic balance.

Singapore Management University law professor Eugene Tan noted that it would be harder for the Government to maintain the current ethnic composition.

Gan had said in February that the Government will maintain the “broad balance” of the citizen population and continue to carefully manage the impact of immigration on Singapore’s population composition to preserve the “overall texture of society”.

SMU’s Tan said that granting more PRs and citizenship to people of Chinese descent is one way to maintain this broad balance.

Singapore’s ethnic composition has remained broadly stable over the past decade, according to the 2025 Population Trends report.

As at June 2025, the ethnic Chinese made up 73.9 per cent of Singapore’s resident population, while Malays accounted for 13.5 per cent, Indians 9 per cent and Others 3.5 per cent.

While the number of new immigrants is important, Tan said, another equally key factor is how well and quickly they integrate into Singapore society.

He added: “To be clear, integration is a two-way street. It takes two hands to clap.

“Integration also requires that the existing population be accepting and welcoming of the new members to the community.”