Germany’s Live Births Per Federal State

Key Takeaways

• Births in Germany are highly concentrated. Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bayern, and Baden-Württemberg account for more than half of all live births in 2024.
• Nordrhein-Westfalen alone accounts for nearly one in four births. This reflects its role as Germany’s largest and most densely populated demographic hub.
• Population structure explains most differences between states, rather than fertility behavior. This includes factors such as overall population size and long-term internal migration.
• A broad middle of mostly western states contributes between 2% and 10% of births, driven by scale and urban concentration.
• Eastern states cluster at the lower end of the distribution. This reflects smaller populations, older age structures, and decades of out-migration.

Germany’s Live Births per Federal State

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Learn something new about Germany every week and make informed decisions with confidence.

In 2024, Germany recorded 677,117 live births.

Those births were not evenly distributed across the country. Instead, they were highly concentrated in a small number of large states.

Population growth in Germany ->

Three states dominate the birth landscape

Nordrhein-Westfalen recorded 152,688 births, representing around 23% of all births nationwide. That means nearly one in four children born in Germany in 2024 was born in a single state.

This reflects NRW’s position as:

• Germany’s most populous state, with a large base of women of childbearing age
• Home to several large metropolitan regions (e.g., Rhine-Ruhr, Cologne, Düsseldorf), which attract and retain the younger adult population
• A long-standing demographic center of gravity, reinforced by decades of internal migration and industrial development

For the same reasons, Bayern (114,365) and Baden-Württemberg (97,507) also rank at the top. Together with NRW, these three states account for more than half of all births in Germany.

Population per federal state in Germany ->

A quiet east–west pattern

After the three dominant states, the distribution flattens quickly.
Once states are grouped by share, a clear geographic pattern emerges.

Most Western states dominate the middle and upper long-tail groups. They contribute between 2% and 10% of births.

• Niedersachsen (9.7%)
• Hessen (7.8%)
• Rheinland-Pfalz (5%)
• Sachsen (3.6%)
• Schleswig-Holstein (3.2%)
• Hamburg (2.6%)
• Brandenburg (2.2%)

By contrast, several eastern states appear most often in the lowest birth-share group:

• Sachsen-Anhalt (1.8%)
• Thüringen (1.7%)
• Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (1.4%)

This pattern reflects long-term structural factors rather than short-term behavior:

• Smaller populations have been following sustained out-migration since the 1990s
• Older age profiles, with fewer women in childbearing ages
• Weaker metropolitan pull compared with western urban regions