Fewer Than Wanted

Essay · society · September 2026

The Portuguese say a family should have between two and three children, and want about two for themselves. They expect to have 1.7, and the country’s fertility rate is 1.4. Half of women in their forties had fewer children than they wanted. Asked why, most say it was their own choice; many also name money, work and housing. The evidence from abroad says policy can help at the margin, and that who does the work at home may matter as much as money.

Reading time ≈ 8 min Wanted → had → why → what helps

The question

Several essays in this series ran into the same number without stopping at it. The Rent found young Portuguese living with their parents into their thirties; The Unpaid Ledger found women carrying most of the work at home; The Treadmill found pensions that depend on the size of the next generation. They meet in the birth rate. This essay asks how far Portugal’s low fertility reflects what people want, and how far it reflects what stops them.

1.41children per woman in Portugal in 2024, down from 3.16 in 1960; the low was 1.21 in 2013

2.15children the Portuguese desire for themselves, on average; they expect to have 1.69

51%of women aged 40 to 49 had fewer children than they wanted

26%of births in 2024 were to mothers of foreign citizenship, up from 9% in 2013

The number

From three children to one and a half

In 1960 a Portuguese woman could expect to have about three children. The rate fell below the level that replaces a generation, 2.1, in 1982, and reached 1.21 in 2013, at the bottom of the crisis, one of the lowest rates in Europe. It has since recovered a little, to 1.41 in 2024, which is now above Spain (1.10), Italy (1.18) and the EU average (1.34) (Figure 1).[1] Births fell from about 214,000 in 1960 to a low of 79,600 in 2021 and were 84,600 in 2024.

Fig. 1 — Total fertility rate (the number of children a woman would have at the age-specific birth rates of the year), Portugal, Spain, Italy, France and the EU (27 countries, from 2013), 1960–2024. Data: Eurostat, demo_find.

Part of the fall is postponement: the average age of a mother at her first birth rose from 24.9 in 1990 to 30.3 in 2024.[1] A yearly rate falls while births are being delayed even if women end up with as many children. The completed family size of each generation removes that distortion. On Eurostat’s age-specific rates, Portuguese women born in 1955 had about 2.0 children, those born in 1970 about 1.7, and those born in 1975 about 1.6, with about 9 per cent childless.[2] The fall is real, not only a matter of timing.

The gap

Wanted, expected, had

INE’s fertility survey asks people how many children they think a family should have, how many they want and how many they expect to have. In 2019 the answers were 2.41, 2.15 and 1.69 (Figure 2). Only 7 per cent said they wanted no children at all, against 13 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men in the equivalent Spanish survey.[3] Among women aged 40 to 49, near the end of their fertile years, 51 per cent had had fewer children than they wanted and 40 per cent exactly as many; among men the same age, 55 per cent had fewer. Almost half of mothers and more than half of fathers had their first child later than they had wanted to.[3]

Fig. 2 — Portugal: mean number of children considered ideal for a family, desired for oneself and expected in the end (people aged 18–49 for women and 18–54 for men, 2019); completed fertility of women born in 1975 (author’s calculation from age-specific rates); total fertility rate in 2019. Data: INE, Inquérito à Fecundidade 2019, Destaque, pp. 1 and 7; Eurostat, demo_frate and demo_find.

So the Portuguese do not, on the whole, want small families. They end up with them. The gap between what people desire and what they expect, about half a child each, is the part of low fertility that could in principle be changed without changing what anyone wants.

The reasons

Will, and what shapes it

The same survey asks why. Among parents who do not intend to have more children, 80 per cent say an important reason is that they already have the children they want (Figure 3). But many also cite constraints: 56 per cent of mothers name money, 51 per cent the difficulty of combining work and family, 44 per cent job stability and 39 per cent housing, with men citing each less often.[4] Women who had their first child later than they wanted most often named the wish to be a mother at the right moment, the right partner, job stability (53 per cent) and housing (44 per cent).[3]

Fig. 3 — Portugal, 2019: parents who do not intend to have more children, share rating each reason important or very important, women and men (selected reasons; several could be chosen). Data: M. J. V. Rosa and I. T. de Oliveira, chapter in INE, Inquérito à Fecundidade 2019, Figure 6, p. 21.

The survey’s authors conclude that the decision to have children is “above all a question of will”: only 14 per cent of respondents gave socio-economic constraints more weight than their own wishes.[4] They also note the limit of that reading: what people say they want is itself shaped by what seems possible. Constraints weighed more for people on fixed-term contracts than for those with permanent jobs, and most among the unemployed.[4] The answers also depend on the moment. In 2013, at the bottom of the crisis, the cost of children was the most cited reason, named as important by 86 per cent of mothers not planning more; the 2013 and 2019 questionnaires listed different reasons, so the two cannot be read as a trend.[5]

The evidence

What moves births

Studies elsewhere suggest that each of the constraints Portuguese parents name has a measurable effect, though none is large on its own.

Housing. In the United States, a $10,000 rise in house prices raised births by 5 per cent among homeowners, who gained wealth, and lowered them by 2.4 per cent among renters, who faced higher costs.[6] The direction depends on who owns; in Portugal, as The Rent showed, most young adults do not.

Insecure jobs. A model of Portuguese women’s careers estimates that replacing fixed-term contracts with permanent ones would cut childlessness at 41 by about 2.7 percentage points; in Italy, women exposed to a 2015 reform that weakened job protection became 1.4 points less likely to have a child.[7][8]

Who does the work at home. Across rich countries, the old pattern has reversed: countries where more women work now have higher fertility, not lower. The economists Matthias Doepke, Fabian Kindermann, Michèle Tertilt and colleagues point to family policy, flexible labour markets and fathers who share the work; among rich countries, the share of housework and childcare done by men correlates with fertility at more than 0.7.[9] In Portugal, in couples, women usually do the laundry in 78 per cent of cases and stay home with a sick child in 64 per cent; men do the latter in 9 per cent.[3]

Money. Spain paid €2,500 for every birth from July 2007; births rose by about 6 per cent and abortions fell, until the payment was abolished in 2010.[10] Germany’s 2007 reform, which replaced a flat parental allowance with one tied to earnings, raised fertility among university-educated women by up to 22 per cent relative to women with little education.[11] Applied to Portugal, an effect the size of Spain’s would mean about 5,000 more births a year, closing perhaps a fifth of the gap between the children people want and expect, if it lasted; much of such effects is often births brought forward rather than added.[2]

Portugal’s policy

Crèches yes, leave and cash less

Portuguese family policy is unusual. On childcare it does well: 59 per cent of children under three were in formal childcare in 2024, almost all of them full-time, against 39 per cent in the EU, after crèches were made free from September 2022 (Figure 4). On the OECD’s model, the net cost of full-time childcare for a couple on average wages is about 4 per cent of household income, low by international standards.[12][13]

Fig. 4 — Children under three in formal childcare (any hours), per cent, Portugal, Germany, Italy and the EU (27 countries), 2005–2024. Data: Eurostat, EU-SILC, ilc_caindformal.

On cash and leave it spends less. Public spending on family benefits was about 1.8 per cent of GDP in 2021, against an EU average of 2.7 and more than 3 per cent in France, Germany and Sweden. Paid leave available to a mother totals about 30 weeks, against an EU average of 70; unusually, the leave reserved for fathers, 22 weeks, is well above the EU average of 13.[13]

The new parents

Births and immigration

The recent recovery in births has come from immigration (Figure 5). Births to mothers of Portuguese citizenship fell from about 76,000 in 2019 to 62,000 in 2024; births to mothers of foreign citizenship doubled, to 22,000, a quarter of the total. Counted by the mother’s country of birth, a third of births in 2024 were to mothers born abroad.[14] Immigrants also say they want slightly more children than natives.[3] The Portuguese birth rate of recent years is therefore partly a measure of who has come to live in Portugal.

Fig. 5 — Live births in Portugal by citizenship of the mother, thousands, 2010–2024. Data: Eurostat, demo_faczc.

The balance

What the numbers say

Portugal’s low fertility is not mainly a choice to have no children: few Portuguese want none, and most want two. It is a gap between the two children people want and the one and a half they have, opened by late starts, and felt most by those in insecure work. The people concerned mostly describe their decisions as their own, and they are; but the decision is made later, and with less room, than it used to be.

The evidence suggests that no single policy closes the gap. Portugal has already made crèches free and near-universal, which removes one constraint. Cash payments raise births modestly and partly bring them forward. The remaining levers are the ones this series has discussed from other angles: secure jobs for the young, homes they can afford, and a more even division of the work at home. They would matter for their own sake, and they are also, by the evidence, the conditions under which people in rich countries have the children they say they want.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification, editorial direction and critical review; machine data research, analysis and drafting. The figures and derived numbers are computed by scripts/fertility.py from Eurostat, the OECD Family Database and INE’s fertility surveys of 2013 and 2019. Completed fertility by generation is the author’s calculation from Eurostat’s age-specific rates, because the Human Fertility Database requires registration. Reasons for having fewer children are what respondents say, after the fact; the survey’s authors caution that stated will may itself reflect constraints. The Portuguese study of fixed-term contracts is a preliminary version. The estimate of 5,000 births from a Spanish-sized effect is an illustration, not a forecast. Results are in docs/fertility-results.json and the figures in docs/fertility-figures.html; the downloaded sources, with a table or page reference for every number, are kept with the script’s data.

The cover photograph is Playground, Parque da Alfarrobeira, Albufeira by Kolforn; CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Related essays on this blog

1. The Rent — house prices and the young.
2. The Unpaid Ledger — housework, care and leisure over a lifetime, for women and men.
3. The Treadmill — why pensions, debts and jobs depend on growth.
4. The Sustainability Story — the Portuguese pension system and its forecasts.

Sources

1. Eurostat, fertility indicators (demo_find): total fertility rate, mean age of women at birth of first child; live births (demo_gind).
2. Author’s calculation from Eurostat age-specific fertility rates (demo_frate) and births by order (demo_fordager), and population (demo_pjan).
3. INE, Inquérito à Fecundidade 2019, Destaque, December 2020, pp. 1, 5–7, 11, 14–15, 17–21.
4. M. J. V. Rosa and I. T. de Oliveira, chapter in INE, Inquérito à Fecundidade 2019, pp. 12–26 (Figure 6, p. 21; synthesis pp. 22–25; conclusion p. 26).
5. INE and Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, Inquérito à Fecundidade 2013, pp. 66–67 and 103.
6. L. J. Dettling and M. S. Kearney, “House prices and birth rates: The impact of the real estate market on the decision to have a baby”, Journal of Public Economics, 2014; NBER Working Paper 17485, abstract.
7. M. C. Lopes, “Job Security and Fertility Decision”, preliminary version, Nova SBE, 2017, Table 7, p. 38.
8. M. De Paola, R. Nisticò and V. Scoppa, “Fertility Decisions and Employment Protection: the Unintended Consequences of the Italian Jobs Act”, CSEF Working Paper 596, 2021, abstract.
9. M. Doepke, A. Hannusch, F. Kindermann and M. Tertilt, “The Economics of Fertility: A New Era”, Handbook of the Economics of the Family, 2023; NBER Working Paper 29948, abstract and pp. 2 and 33.
10. L. González, “The Effect of a Universal Child Benefit on Conceptions, Abortions, and Early Maternal Labor Supply”, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5(3), 2013; IZA Discussion Paper 5994, pp. 15 and 25.
11. A. Raute, “Can financial incentives reduce the baby gap? Evidence from a reform in maternity leave benefits”, Journal of Public Economics, 2019; NBER Working Paper 23793, abstract.
12. Eurostat, EU-SILC, children in formal childcare by age group and duration (ilc_caindformal).
13. OECD Family Database: PF1.1 public spending on family benefits (2021); PF2.1 parental leave systems (2025); net childcare costs (OECD tax-benefit model, 2023).
14. Eurostat, live births by mother’s citizenship (demo_faczc) and country of birth (demo_facbc).