Fewest Births Since 1978: Inside the ONS Mid-2025 Population Estimates

The Office for National Statistics has published its population estimates for mid-2025, and the headline is not the total but the slowdown. England and Wales reached 62.0 million people, an increase of just 224,900 over the year, or 0.4 per cent. That is the lowest rate of increase since mid-2020, when the pandemic closed borders and froze movement.

Three things happened at once. Net migration more than halved. Births fell to their lowest number since 1978. And for the first time in years, large parts of the country stopped growing altogether, including London and the whole of Wales.

The growth engine has changed gear

Population change comes from two sources: natural change, which is births minus deaths, and migration. For the last few years migration has done almost all of the work. It still does, but on a dramatically smaller scale.

Net international migration fell from 612,500 in the year to mid-2024 to 211,700 in the year to mid-2025. Immigration dropped from 1,197,500 to 816,500, while emigration rose slightly from 584,900 to 604,800. More people left, and far fewer arrived.

The gold slivers in that chart are the point worth pausing on. Natural change contributed 19,600 people to a country of 62 million. Strip migration out and the population of England and Wales is very close to standing still.

Births at a 47-year low

There were 588,000 births in the year to mid-2025, down 8,000 on the previous year and the fewest recorded since mid-1978. Deaths also fell, down 2,300 to 568,400. The two lines are now closer together than at any point in recent memory, and the gap between them is what is left of natural growth.

Where the population actually fell

England grew by 227,600 to 58,834,800, a rise of 0.4 per cent. Wales went the other way, losing 2,800 people to finish at 3,175,200. That is a fall of 0.1 per cent and the first decrease recorded in Wales since mid-2015.

Within England, the pattern inverted the story of the last decade. The North West grew fastest at 0.74 per cent. London shrank by 0.29 per cent, its first decrease since mid-2021. London still had more births than deaths and still gained people from abroad, but that was more than cancelled out by the number of people leaving the capital for elsewhere in the UK.

From Rugby to the Isles of Scilly

At local authority level the spread is much wider. Rugby in Warwickshire grew fastest of anywhere in England and Wales, up 2.4 per cent from 122,666 to 125,594. At the other end, the Isles of Scilly lost 3.5 per cent of its residents, falling from 2,383 to 2,299, though on a base that small a change of 84 people is enough to top the table. Camden recorded the largest fall of any sizeable authority, down 1.8 per cent from 220,558 to 216,658.

The more revealing number is how many places grew at all. Only 240 of 318 local authorities, or 75 per cent, gained population. In each of the previous three years that figure was above 94 per cent. Growth has not simply slowed, it has narrowed to fewer places.

An older country, and a rapidly growing oldest group

Underneath the migration story is a slower and more certain one. The median age in England is now 40.6 years and in Wales 43.2. People aged 65 and over rose by 216,200 in England, up 2.0 per cent, and now make up 19.1 per cent of the population. In Wales the same group is 22.2 per cent of the total. Children fell in both countries.

The oldest ages are growing fastest of all. There are now 15,172 people aged 100 or over in England and Wales, a rise of 21.6 per cent since 2015. The number aged 105 and over reached 709, up 34.0 per cent in a single year. The old-age dependency ratio now stands at 283 pensionable-age people for every 1,000 of working age, rising to 336 in Wales.

One footnote that matters

The ONS also revised its earlier estimates using updated international migration data. The mid-2024 total was revised down by 21,600 to 61,785,000. More significantly, the number of under-16s was revised down by 139,000 for mid-2024. Anyone who built a forecast, a school place plan or a catchment model on the earlier figures is working from a different baseline than they thought.

What this means for places

National totals hide almost everything interesting. A country growing at 0.4 per cent contains a Rugby at plus 2.4 and a Camden at minus 1.8. The useful question is not what happened to England and Wales, but what happened where you live.

You can explore the underlying geography on our profiles for England and Wales, which break population, density, age structure and housing down by county. From there you can drill into any county, such as Greater London or the West Midlands, and on down to individual towns and postcode districts. Our postcode density checker shows how tightly populated any given district is, and the UK rankings put places side by side.

The data behind this

All figures in this article come from the Office for National Statistics bulletin Population estimates for England and Wales: mid-2025, published July 2026, together with its accompanying components of change and local authority datasets. Percentages are as published by the ONS. Where the bulletin gave a range rather than a full breakdown, as with the middle English regions, we have charted only the figures actually stated.

Source: ONS, Population estimates for England and Wales: mid-2025. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Charts and analysis by Postcodes UK.