In Germany in 2022, a total of 20.3 million mothers aged 15 to 75 lived with biological children. This means that almost two thirds (64 percent) of all women in this age group had given birth to at least one child, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Wednesday in Wiesbaden. 33 percent of mothers had one child and 47 percent had two children. One in five mothers (21 percent) had three or more children. The Federal Office published the figures based on the microcensus on the occasion of Mother’s Day on May 12th.
According to the figures, one in five women in Germany remained without biological offspring. At the end of the typical fertile phase – the statisticians assume an age between 45 and 54 years – their proportion was 20 percent. The highest childless rates nationwide were in the major cities of Hamburg (29 percent) and Berlin (24 percent) as well as in the Middle Franconia region (25 percent).
Interestingly, there was still a difference between East and West when it came to motherhood and the number of children: “In the East, women are mothers more often than in the West, but they are less likely to have multiple children,” emphasized the experts.
For better Europe-wide comparability, 38 regions nationwide were evaluated according to the so-called European NUTS 2 system; according to the information, these usually correspond to an administrative district. Accordingly, the seven regions with the lowest childless rates were all in the eastern federal states. In contrast, in most western regions the childless rate and the proportion of mothers with three or more children were higher than in the eastern regions.
These results refer to information from women between the ages of 15 and 75 in the 2022 microcensus. No adopted or foster children were taken into account, only biological children, regardless of whether they live in the respondent’s household.
