Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
South Korea lost 109,000 people last year. The country had 254,500 babies and 363,400 deaths, the fifth year in a row it has shrunk. The average Korean woman will have fewer than one child in her lifetime, a number no other country in the world matches.
To keep a country from shrinking, you need each woman to have about 2.1 children on average. Japan, the country famous for low birth rates, is at 1.15. The US sits around 1.62 and the European Union averages 1.46. South Korea is at 0.80, the lowest of any developed country, and has been below 1.0 every year since 2018. Seoul runs even lower at around 0.58, with several neighborhoods below 0.50.
Housing in Seoul is the main blocker. An apartment there costs 15 to 20 times the typical yearly salary, beyond what most young couples can afford. Renting isn't much better. Under Korea's jeonse system, you put down a single massive deposit instead of monthly rent, and that deposit can run over $400,000 for one apartment. About 95% of Korean babies are still born to married couples, so when fewer people get married, the birth rate falls too.
Since 2006, the Korean government has spent roughly $270 billion trying to fix it, with cash bonuses for every baby, longer paid time off for new parents than almost any other rich country, government-funded IVF, more public daycare, and even state-organized dating events for single people. Over those same 20 years, the birth rate dropped from 1.13 to 0.80. More than 4,000 elementary, middle, and high schools have permanently shut down since 1980, and the first-grade class of 2024 was the smallest in Korean history.
The birth rate has actually risen two years in a row, from 0.72 in 2023 to 0.75 in 2024 to 0.80 in 2025. For 17 months in a row, more babies were born than in the same month the year before. Statistics Korea credits two things: a wave of weddings that got postponed during the pandemic, and a large group of women now in their early 30s, the peak age for having a first child. But Sojung Lim, a Korea studies professor at SUNY Buffalo, told CNN this bump is probably temporary. The post-Covid wedding wave will pass, and the next generation of women heading into their 30s is smaller.
The UN's main forecast has South Korea shrinking from 51.6 million people today to about 30 million by 2100. A think tank in Seoul, the Korean Peninsula Population Institute, ran a worst-case scenario that lands the country at 7.5 million by 2125, less than the population of Seoul today.