European births, Q4 2025 update

This is the Q4 2025 edition of my collection of monthly and annual births data for Europe (for a guide to the Excel file, see the bottom of this post). From 2026 on, I will likely slow down to semiannual updates, and also check if I can find enough data to compute birth rates. For Switzerland, the total number of deaths is final but the allocation to months provisional.

As before, I plotted monthly births against the 2017-2020 median (in the Excel file: “months_vs_4” for the data, and “diag_vs_4” for the diagram), and computed quantiles of the resulting distributions of quotients (Example: 89% median (red line) for Jan. 2023 means that 13 of the 28 countries considered recorded less than 89% of the median for Jan. 2017-2020, 13 recorded more, and 89% is the mean value for the two countries in the middle). As an alternative (with very different weighting of countries), for the dashed red line, I summed births per month over all 28 countries, and then compared to the 2017-2020 median.

Things look in 2025 as they did in 2023 and 2024. Monthly births are on the way down (maybe we have reached a kind of plateau now); both the beginning of 2022 and the beginning of 2023 seem to mark cliffs. Go back nine months from there to investigate.

Guide to the Excel file:

• sheets “home” and “diag”: cumulative 2022-2025 figures for up to 40 countries against the 2017-2021 median

• sheet “years”: overview of annual births 2017-2024, including ranks

• sheet “months_total”: alternative (sum births over countries, then compare to 2017-2020 median)

• sheet “months_vs_4” and “diag_vs_4”: monthly births for 2021-2025 against the 2017-2020 median

• country sheets: data on monthly births and deaths; diagrams (“b”) show cumulative annual figures against the 2017-2021 median (as in “home”)

• Medians are computed using basic Excel functionality (for 28 data points, the average of the 14th and 15th largest). As a check of dependence on the estimator, the file also provides (approximations to) Harrell-Davis median estimates.