Family support measures credited as fall in annual births roughly halves compared with recent years
Greece’s long-running decline in births has slowed markedly in the first eight months of 2026, according to civil registry data from the Ministry of Interior, in what campaigners have described as an encouraging, if fragile, sign of progress on the country’s demographic crisis.
Some 43,339 births were recorded between January and August, a figure that, extrapolated across the full year, points to a total of around 65,000. The final figure could come in slightly higher, since December has historically recorded more births than the average month.
That would still leave the annual total below 2025’s figure of 66,532 births, but the year-on-year decline appears considerably smaller than in previous years. Births had risen from a low of 64,568 in 2013, before the downward trend accelerated sharply after the pandemic: 86,390 in 2021, 77,106 in 2022, 72,244 in 2023, 69,675 in 2024, and 66,532 in 2025.
If the pace recorded in the first eight months of 2026 holds for the rest of the year, and proves not to be a temporary blip, the annual decline in births is expected to come in at around 1,500 — sharply down from losses that had exceeded 3,000 a year over the preceding three-year period.
Civil registry figures are administrative data rather than a full demographic study, but they offer an early indication of trends in the birth rate and are used in shaping and evaluating family support policy.
Dimitra-Ines Angeli, secretary-general of the Supreme Confederation of Large Families of Greece, described the roughly 50% slowdown in the rate of decline as an “extremely positive development.” She told the Athens-Macedonian News Agency that the trend was linked to economic, employment and social measures supporting families, and said continuing these policies could bolster confidence among young couples and help gradually address the country’s demographic problem.
Between 2019 and 2025, Greece introduced a series of family support measures, including a birth grant, expanded vouchers for nursery places, the “Neighbourhood Nannies” childcare scheme, nine months of maternity leave, paternity leave, parental leave, tax relief scaled to the number of children in a family, and more favourable housing eligibility criteria for larger families.
