The age pattern of fertility
How many children women had at each age, from the 1850s to today. Births at ages 40–44 were several times more common in the 19th century than they are now.
An age-specific fertility rate is the number of births in a year to women of a given age group, per 1,000 women in that group. Iceland has published these rates every year since 1853. England and Wales have official annual rates from 1911, and research estimates for 1891 and 1901.
In both countries, births to women in their early 40s were much more common in the 19th and early 20th centuries than today. When families were large, a woman's youngest child was often born in her late 30s or early 40s, as the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure notes. Today childbearing is concentrated around ages 25–34. Rates at 40+ fell to a low point in the late 20th century and have risen somewhat since, but they remain far below 19th-century levels. These are period rates, a snapshot of each year, not the lifetime experience of any group of women.
Iceland: 115.5 births per 1,000 women aged 40–44 in 1853, against 13.3 per 1,000 women aged 40–44 in 2025.
- Earliest year (1853)
- 115.5
- per 1,000 women aged 40–44 · Statistics Iceland
- Lowest year (1985)
- 5.9
- per 1,000 women aged 40–44 · Statistics Iceland
- Latest year (2025)
- 13.3
- per 1,000 women aged 40–44 · Statistics Iceland
Statistics Iceland counts all births to mothers under 20 in the 15–19 rate and all births to mothers 45 and over in the 45–49 rate. 1854 is blank in the source table.
Have a correction, a better estimate, or additional data—at the global, national, regional, or city level? Help improve the data
15–19 years
20–24 years
25–29 years
30–34 years
35–39 years
40–44 years
45–49 years
Statistics Iceland counts all births to mothers under 20 in the 15–19 rate and all births to mothers 45 and over in the 45–49 rate. 1854 is blank in the source table.
Have a correction, a better estimate, or additional data—at the global, national, regional, or city level? Help improve the data
Sources and licences
- Statistics Iceland — Fertility 1853–2025 (MAN05201) · CC BY 4.0
Statistics Iceland, table MAN05201. Live births per 1,000 women by age of mother. The 15–19 rate counts all births to mothers under 20, and 45–49 all births to mothers 45 and over. Population estimates were revised in March 2024 for 2011 onwards.
- ONS — Births in England and Wales: birth registrations, 2025 edition, Table 10 · Open Government Licence v3.0
Office for National Statistics. Age-specific fertility rates by age of mother, England, Wales and Elsewhere. “Under 20” is per 1,000 women aged 15–19 and “40 and over” per 1,000 women aged 40–44. Population estimates for 1938–1980 are rounded to the nearest hundred.
- General Register Office (1947), Statistical Review of England and Wales for the Years 1938 and 1939 · Accessed via the Human Fertility Collection (cite HFC as intermediary)
General Register Office (1947), Statistical Review of England and Wales for the Years 1938 and 1939, London: HMSO. Via Human Fertility Collection, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Vienna Institute of Demography, www.fertilitydata.org (file GBRTENW_05).
- Haines (1990), research estimates · Accessed via the Human Fertility Collection (cite HFC as intermediary)Estimate
Haines, M.R. (1990), “Western fertility in mid-transition: fertility and nuptiality in the United States and selected nations at the turn of the century”, Journal of Family History 15. Research estimates, not vital registration. Via Human Fertility Collection (file GBRTENW_04). No 45–49 group.
The Human Fertility Collection asks to be cited as intermediary: Human Fertility Collection, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany) and Vienna Institute of Demography (Austria), www.fertilitydata.org. The Human Fertility Database carries overlapping series for both countries; the figures here come from the national statistical offices directly. These series are not served by the birthrate.io Data API.
What is not shown, and why
- England before 1891. The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP) has published a chart of English age-specific fertility for 1600–1749 based on parish-register family reconstitution (Wrigley et al. 1997, English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837, p. 355; Hinde 2003, England's Population, pp. 133–4). We did not find those rates in an openly published table, and we do not read values off charts, so they are left out. See Jaadla, Reid and Garrett (2024), “Changing fertility and timing of motherhood in England and Wales – a long view”.
- England and Wales in 1881. CAMPOP's 1881–1911 curves use the own-children method on census records (Reid et al., Populations Past). Populations Past publishes district-level data, not a national age-specific table, so 1881 is not shown. 1891 and 1901 here come from a different study (Haines 1990) and will not match CAMPOP's curves exactly.
- Age at last child. Ruben Arslan has charted the age at which women and men had their last child in 20th-century Sweden, historical Sweden, the Krummhörn (Germany) and Québec, the four populations studied in “Older fathers' children have lower evolutionary fitness across four centuries and in four populations”, Proc. R. Soc. B 284 (2017). We did not find an open table of those distributions, so we link to the paper instead.
Data compiled 2026-10-27. Back to the fertility explorer.