Singapore’s low TFR is more than just a financial problem
Singapore’s total fertility rate (TFR) hit an all-time low of 0.87 in 2025. To put that in perspective, a country needs a TFR of at least 2.1 to maintain its population without immigration. Singapore is now well below that threshold—and the decline shows little sign of slowing.
Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong called it an existential issue, warning that “over time, it will be practically impossible to reverse the trend because we will have fewer and fewer women who can bear children.”
Demographers project that by 2050, seniors aged 65 and above could make up half of Singapore’s population, while the working-age population may shrink by 16%. This is closely tied to falling birth rates: when fewer children are born over time, there are eventually fewer people entering the workforce to replace retiring generations.
As the population ages and the pool of working adults shrinks, a smaller base of taxpayers must support a growing elderly population, placing increasing strain on public finances and the broader economy.
Singapore has been aware of this problem for decades.
It has spent billions trying to fix it—annual spending on marriage and parenthood support alone quintupled to S$2.5 billion between 2001 and 2017, and has only grown since. But the results have been largely limited. Every prime minister since Lee Kuan Yew has tried to move the needle, but the TFR has only continued to decline from 1.82 in 1980 to 0.87 in 2025.
This raises an uncomfortable question: monetary aid is certainly helpful, but is the government actually addressing the right problem?
What the government has done
The Singapore government’s response to falling birth rates has been, by any measure, substantial, and its Marriage & Parenthood Package under the Made for Families Initiative is widely recognised by the United Nations as one of the “most comprehensive pronatalist programmes in Asia,” covering everything from cash transfers to housing, parental leave, and childcare.
For every newborn, parents receive a Baby Bonus Cash Gift of S$11,000 for the first and second child, a S$5,000 First Step Grant in a government co-savings account, a S$5,000 MediSave Grant for healthcare, and a S$5,000 Parenthood Tax Rebate. In total, this amounts to a baseline of around S$26,000 in direct benefits for a first child alone, before factoring in additional childcare subsidies, housing grants, and education-related support.
On parental leave, working parents now have a combined total of 30 weeks of paid leave, comprising 16 weeks of maternity leave, 4 mandatory weeks of paternity leave, and a new 10-week Shared Parental Leave pool.
Beyond this, the government has also expanded childcare infrastructure, doubling full-day preschools from around 100,000 in 2013 to over 200,000, and progressively reduced fee caps at government-supported centres.
On education, Singapore Citizens pay no monthly school fees at the primary level, and just S$5 a month at secondary school. According to SingStat data sourced from the Ministry of Education, the government spends approximately S$14,541 per primary school student and around S$18,619 per secondary school student annually. Fees only begin to rise meaningfully at the tertiary level, where polytechnic and university costs step up significantly.
Meanwhile, priority housing schemes give married couples with children earlier access to public housing, and the Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests took effect in Dec 2024, requiring employers to properly consider caregivers’ requests for flexible arrangements.
On paper, this is an extraordinarily generous package by the Singapore government. And yet, the TFR keeps falling.
Singapore is not alone in trying all these monetary measures. Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan have all tried different versions of the same playbook—cash transfers, longer parental leave, more childcare—with equally disappointing results.
Financial incentives alone cannot fix what is fundamentally not a financial problem, despite the high cost of living being a key consideration in having a child in Singapore.
The actual problem
There is a fundamental flaw in Singapore’s approach: every single one of these policies is targeted at people who have already decided to have children.
The Baby Bonus helps you once you’re pregnant. Parental leave supports you once a child is born. Childcare subsidies reduce the cost of raising a child you’ve already had. Even the housing priority scheme assumes you’ve already committed to starting a family.
Essentially, the government is optimising the experience of parenthood for those who have already chosen it, but doing almost nothing to address the far larger and more critical group: people who have decided they don’t want children at all.
The numbers bear this out. Singapore’s TFR problem is not primarily that parents are having fewer second or third children (though that matters, too). It’s that a growing proportion of Singaporeans are simply not becoming parents in the first place.
The proportion of married women without children has more than doubled from 6.7% in 2004 to 14.4% in 2024. Total marriages registered fell 7% in 2024, driven by fewer unions among those aged 25–34—the prime family-formation years. At the same time, the median age at first marriage has risen steadily, from 28.2 years for brides in 2014 to 29.6 years in 2024.
Taken together, these shifts point to a delayed and shrinking window for family formation, which helps explain the long-term decline in birth rates. But beyond delays alone, a growing number of young Singaporeans are not just postponing parenthood—they are choosing to forgo it entirely.
The government has made some cultural gestures, especially through the Families for Life community programmes, to promote a “family-friendly culture ” through bonding activities and supportive resources.
However, these are surface-level nudges rather than structural interventions. They assume the desire for children already exists and just needs encouragement. In doing that, they fail to grapple with the far harder question: what happens when that desire has been eroded entirely?
Moreover, the political discourse hasn’t helped. Conversations about marriage and parenthood in Singapore have historically been framed in transactional terms—what you get, what it costs, what the government will subsidise. When the narrative around having children is built on spreadsheets rather than meaning, it’s unsurprising that people run the numbers and opt out.
Why Singaporeans really don’t want children
The real reasons more Singaporeans are choosing not to have children go beyond monetary concerns. They are psychological, philosophical, and cultural, and cannot be solved by the mere gift of a larger Baby Bonus.
1. Philosophical anxiety about a pessimistic future & generational trauma
A growing number of young Singaporeans carry a quiet but real fear: “What kind of life am I bringing a child into?”
This is largely not irrational, but a genuine reckoning with the Singapore they have inherited—high costs of living, relentless pressure to perform, a society where the path from birth to CPF feels pre-scripted and exhausting from the societal rat race.
“Do I really want to give life to a generation that will have to deal with what I am dealing with now that may only get possibly worse?” one netizen commented on an Instagram post by Rice Media discussing Singapore’s fertility rate. While not representative of everyone, it captures a sentiment that surfaces frequently, even if not always openly expressed.
There is also a growing awareness of generational trauma: the patterns of emotional unavailability, perfectionism, and anxiety that parents pass down to children (evident from the countless extracurricular classes, tuition and enrichment lessons children here are sent to)—and a conscious choice by some not to continue that cycle.
No financial incentive can speak to existential doubt this deeply.
2. Economic rationality & the real cost of tradeoffs
Yes, raising a child is expensive. But the bigger issue isn’t the price tag—it’s everything else you’re trading away to have one.
A generation of Singaporeans, more educated and economically empowered than any before them, now has more compelling alternatives to parenthood than ever: travel, career progression, financial independence, and personal freedom.
A child is not just a financial expense—it is a permanent reallocation of one’s time, identity, and autonomy.
When you have worked hard to build a life you enjoy, and you can see clearly what a child would cost you in terms of sleep, career, relationships, and spontaneity, the calculus looks very different from what it did for previous generations, for whom alternatives were fewer and social expectations of a nuclear family were much more strongly enforced.
3. Work culture & the myth of balance
Singapore’s work culture is often described as intense and demanding.
Several reports have found that Singapore is the most overworked country in the Asia Pacific Region. In fact, it has the longest working hours per week at 45, followed by China at 42.
In the Rice Media Instagram post, another netizen even noted that they only get about an hour a day with their children due to the demands of work.
Even where parental leave exists on paper, its use is often shaped by workplace culture. Research by the Ministry of Social and Family Development found that a key reason some fathers who wanted to take paternity leave did not do so was concern over career repercussions, workload implications, or the burden placed on colleagues during their absence.
Beyond the workplace, the “second shift” of parenthood is just as demanding.
The mental load of raising a child in Singapore—navigating an exam-driven education system, managing enrichment schedules, and constantly worrying about a child’s future in an intensely competitive environment—effectively becomes a full-time job layered on top of an already exhausting full-time job.
For dual-income couples already stretched thin, this is not a problem that can be solved simply by adding more childcare slots or financial incentives. It goes deeper: a question of whether the structure of work and life itself leaves enough space for parenthood to feel sustainable—or even desirable.
4. The era of non-commitment
Relationships are the foundation of family formation, and the landscape in Singapore has shifted dramatically.
The rise of situationships, dating app culture, and a general wariness around long-term commitment among younger Singaporeans means that the pathway to marriage—historically the precursor to children in Singapore’s social context—is less travelled and more delayed than ever.
This is partly economic (settling down is expensive), partly cultural (independence is more valued), and partly a reflection of the same risk-aversion that shows up elsewhere.
Committing to a partner, like committing to a child, is a bet on an uncertain future in an environment that feels precarious.
Resetting the narrative surrounding parenthood
The question we should be asking is not “how do we make having children cheaper?” but rather: why did people once imagine having children, and why have they stopped?
Answering that requires looking at the lived experience of growing up and working in Singapore. The education system that measures worth in grades and portfolios from age seven. The social media landscape that makes childlessness look like freedom and parenthood look like sacrifice. The working adult’s calendar, where evenings and weekends are either recovery time or resume-building.
The question of whether there are spaces in Singapore to simply enjoy being alive, and whether those spaces are accessible without being expensive.
If children growing up in Singapore feel that their childhood was a series of performance reviews, they will not look back on it with warmth. And people do not recreate experiences they do not value.
The image of parenthood changes when the image of childhood changes. That means engaging seriously with education reform—moving away from a system built on academic anxiety toward one that allows children to actually enjoy their youth.
It means addressing work culture honestly, not just at the policy level but at the level of employer norms and social expectations. It means making space for young people to form genuine, committed relationships—and examining what cultural and structural forces are working against that.
None of this is easy, and it will take more than budget reforms to do the trick.
- Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.
Featured Image Credit: szefei via Shutterstock