US fertility hit a record low, but some counties are still booming

American fertility just hit its lowest point on record. The nation's general fertility rate, the number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, fell to 53.1 in 2025, down from 69.5 in 2007 and the lowest since the series began in 1909. The total fertility rate, the more familiar "births per woman" figure, sits at about 1.6, well under the 2.1 needed to replace the population.

That's the national story. The county map underneath it is far messier, and a lot more interesting. We took the Census Bureau's newly released 2025 birth and population estimates and calculated the fertility rate for every county in the country, the same way the Bureau did. The spread is enormous, and the places at the top and bottom aren't random.

The most births and the highest fertility are different places

Here's the counterintuitive part. The counties with the most babies are usually not the ones with the highest birthrates. Los Angeles County had more births than anywhere else in 2025, over 91,000, but its fertility rate was just 44.4, well below the county median of 59. Big counties rack up births by sheer size, not by any special fertility.

Texas is the exception that proves it. Among the country's highest-birth counties, only a cluster in Texas managed both high totals and high rates: Dallas County at 62.7, Harris at 59.0, and Tarrant at 56.9. Nearly everywhere else, the populous counties sat below the middle of the pack.

Where fertility runs highest

The very highest rates belong to small rural counties on the Great Plains and in Alaska, where a few hundred births against a small population can push the rate past 120. Those numbers are real but jumpy, since tiny denominators swing hard.

The more revealing list is the sizable counties, those with at least 10,000 women of childbearing age, that still post rates far above the norm. Three patterns run through them.

At the top are Rockland County, New York and Ocean County, New Jersey, home to large Orthodox Jewish communities in places like Monsey and Lakewood, which have among the highest birthrates in the country. Rockland's rate of 104 is nearly double the national figure, and unlike the tiny rural counties, it's built on thousands of births, not a handful. Below them come the border counties of South Texas, where young Hispanic families push rates into the 80s, and military counties like Liberty, Georgia and Onslow, North Carolina, full of young enlisted families next to Army and Marine bases.

Where it runs lowest: the college towns

The bottom of the list is almost a directory of universities. The lowest fertility rates in the country cluster in college counties, where the population skews heavily toward women in their late teens and early twenties who aren't having children yet. Watauga County, North Carolina (Appalachian State), Tompkins County, New York (Cornell), Monroe County, Indiana (Indiana University), and Benton County, Oregon (Oregon State) all post rates in the low 20s, less than half the national number. Williamsburg, Virginia, dominated by William & Mary, is lower still. These aren't places where nobody has kids; they're places stacked with college-age women who haven't yet.

The regional gradient, and why births still beat deaths

Zoom back out to regions and the South leads at 55.8, followed by the Midwest at 54.7, the West at 51.0, and the Northeast last at 49.9. Every region is far below the old replacement threshold. The clearest regional signal: not a single county in all of New England, from Connecticut to Maine, has a fertility rate above 60.

Yet every region still recorded more births than deaths between 2024 and 2025. Low fertility takes years to reshape a population's age structure, and even then, migration and mortality shift the balance. Fertility is one lever of population change, not the whole machine. Falling birthrates are a slow-moving force, and the county map shows they aren't falling evenly.

How we did it

We calculated the general fertility rate, births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, for every county using the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 births and age-sex population estimates, following the Bureau's own method. As in the Bureau's analysis, we limited the ranking to the 2,701 counties with at least 1,000 women of childbearing age, since smaller counties produce unstable rates. Our figures match the Bureau's published values closely: a median county rate of 59.0 against their 59.1, and Los Angeles at 44.4 against their 44.1.

Sources

County births and population by age and sex are from the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 Population Estimates. National and regional fertility trends, and the replacement-level context, are from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics natality series. The rankings here are an original CensusEasy calculation from the Bureau's county files, replicating the method in its June 2026 analysis of county fertility.