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SINGAPORE \u2013 The gap between the number of births and deaths in Singapore has shrunk to its smallest in almost a century.<\/p>\n
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<\/span><\/a> released by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority on July 27.<\/p>\n The figure is a steep drop from a decade ago, when there were 22,323 more births than deaths in 2015.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The natural increase in the population \u2013 the difference between the number of births and deaths \u2013 is closely watched as Singapore\u2019s population would shrink without immigration when deaths outnumber births.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2025, there were 3,071 more deaths than births among the Chinese, with 16,902 births and 19,973 deaths recorded.<\/p>\n The trend first appeared in 2022, when deaths exceeded births by 311, widening to 920 in 2023. It briefly reversed in 2024 \u2013 the Chinese Year of the Dragon, traditionally seen as an auspicious year for childbirth<\/span><\/a> \u2013 when births exceeded deaths by 99, before slipping back into a deficit in 2025.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2025, the Malay, Indian and Others ethnic groups continued to record natural increases of 3,006, 1,199 and 2,231, respectively.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n For example, the crude birth rate fell from 8.6 in 2015 to 5.3 in 2025 for the Chinese.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n On top of that, the number of Chinese babies born in 2025 fell by 15 per cent compared with 2024, Ang added.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n