More than 90 per cent of Sydney’s suburbs have a fertility rate below replacement level of 2.1 births per woman.
The rising cost of housing in Sydney, including the number of bedrooms, has had an impact on the number of children, Rawnsley said. Couples chose to have it.
“In the past, a woman might have two or three children, but now she chooses one or two children. People are still keen to have children, but often they cannot afford the logistics required to have three or four children,” he said.
The suburbs with the highest births were in the outer suburbs, where housing prices were more affordable. The city’s highest fertility rate – 2.52 – was in the south-western suburb of Spring Farm, about 63 kilometres by road from Sydney’s CBD. Schofields in the city’s northwest had the most births of any suburb in the city in 2023, with 550.
“Young families are being pushed to the outskirts of the city, where there is cheaper housing that can accommodate their children,” Ronzli said.
Across Australia, there were 289,100 births in 2023 – down 4.6 per cent on the previous year and the lowest since 2006. The biggest decline was in Sydney (down 8.6 per cent).
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The decline in births was less pronounced in many regional areas, where births fell by only 0.3 percent since 2019.
