The most revealing recent evidence is about decisions made before a birth appears in the statistics. The 2025 National Fertility Survey, published in September 2026, finds weaker intentions to marry and a lower planned family size. Read alongside the OECD’s analysis of work and household costs, it shows why support for raising a child addresses only part of the problem.
Marriage shapes who becomes a parent
Japan has a close connection between marriage and childbearing. The OECD’s demographic review identifies the long-term decline in marriage as a major driver of low fertility, in a country where births outside marriage have remained around 2%. A smaller share entering marriage therefore affects the number of people likely to become parents.
The new survey puts numbers on that change: among never-married adults aged 18–34, 75.1% of men and 77.8% of women intended eventually to marry. Both shares fell from the preceding survey. IPSS survey results.
This is broader than the decision to have a second baby. People must first want a partnership, find a partner and consider a shared household workable. Policies aimed at parents begin later in that sequence. That difference helps explain why a country can expand support for children while the number of potential new families remains constrained.
Family plans are becoming smaller
Among surveyed married couples, the average ideal family size was 2.18 children and the planned number was 1.95. Cost and the physical and psychological burden of parenting were increasingly cited as reasons for falling short of the ideal. The current fertility survey separates these expectations from actual births.
An ideal expresses the family someone would like; a plan incorporates what they expect to manage. The lower planned total indicates smaller expected families. The cost and burden answers help explain the distance between those expectations and the ideal; preferences alone cannot be assumed to account for it.
These measures describe different groups. The national fertility rate summarises a year’s age-specific birth rates; the survey records intentions among unmarried people and family expectations among couples. Their numbers cannot be substituted for one another or multiplied into a forecast. Their value here is to identify decisions that sit behind the annual outcome.
A child costs time as well as income
The OECD review of Japan connects family formation with young adults’ weak financial position, low-paid non-regular employment and wages that rise with seniority. Those arrangements can make the early years of adult life financially difficult, precisely when a household must decide whether it can support children.
Within a couple, the problem also concerns whose time and earnings absorb the work. The OECD describes an unequal division of unpaid care and barriers to returning to regular employment after a career interruption. Its account explains how the same childcare requirement can create different long-term costs for each parent. Keeping a job, controlling working hours and dividing care are therefore connected parts of the household decision.
Recent conditions are changing. IPSS reports better employment continuity after first births and greater daily involvement by husbands among recent parents. The latest survey findings make the older picture of mothers routinely leaving work less useful as a complete description. The remaining question is whether the combination of work and care feels manageable when a family plans another child.
Child benefits reach families at a particular stage
Japan’s child-allowance expansion removed the income limit and extended support through high-school age. The Children and Families Agency’s current explanation describes support for people raising children. Such payments reduce a real part of the household’s financial burden.
Their reach follows the child. They make raising a family more affordable, while the conditions for forming it involve partnership, housing, earnings and expected care responsibilities. Evaluating policy only by the size of the allowance misses that earlier decision.
Housing adds a local constraint: a household needs a suitable home where work and childcare are accessible. Our analysis of Kyoto’s planned empty-home tax examines one city’s effort to help families remain, alongside the limits of its proposed approach.
The September survey places two pressures alongside the annual birth figures: fewer young adults intend to marry, and couples expect smaller families. Child benefits address the expense of raising those families. The labour-market and care evidence points to a wider task: making the household’s income and daily responsibilities workable when people decide whether to become parents or have another child.
