In 2025, South Korea's fertility rate was just 0.8 births per woman — up from the record-low 0.72 it recorded in 2023, the lowest ever registered for any country — and that modest rebound came only after hundreds of trillions of won in state incentives aimed at reversing the slide

South Korea has spent close to 20 years and hundreds of trillions of won trying to get its citizens to have more children. It mostly has not worked. In 2023 the country hit a fertility rate of 0.72, the lowest ever recorded anywhere in the world.

That number is the average number of children a woman there is expected to have in her lifetime. To keep a population steady without immigration, you need about 2.1. South Korea was at roughly a third of that. The rate had fallen from 0.78 the year before.

By 2025 it had climbed back to 0.80, up from 0.75 in 2024. That is the first sustained rise in years. The tempting reading is that all the money finally worked. The evidence points somewhere less comfortable.

What hundreds of trillions of won actually bought

South Korea has run plan after plan built around cash grants, paid parental leave, more childcare and housing help. By the government’s own count, the bill runs to more than 280 trillion won, about 210 billion US dollars over the past 16 years. 

Even the people who built the programme admit it fell short. In 2023, then-president Yoon Suk-yeol called the effort a failure. That is a striking thing for a government to say about its own flagship policy, and it is hard to argue with. Through the whole spending period the rate kept dropping, and since 2018 South Korea has been the only wealthy OECD country with a fertility rate below 1.

Why the incentives keep missing the point

The main criticism is not that the money was wasted. It is that it was aimed at the wrong problem. A cash grant helps with a baby’s first few months. It does little about the years that follow. As Song Da-yeong, a social welfare professor at Incheon National University, put it in 2023, “Child-rearing is not a matter of providing financial support for the first two years of a child’s life.”

The costs that come later are steep. South Korean families spent a record 26 trillion won on private education in 2022, with nearly 80 percent of students receiving some. Housing tells the same story. Seoul is among the most expensive cities to live in, and it also had the country’s lowest fertility rate, around 0.55 in 2023. Where raising a child costs the most, people have the fewest.

The job market matters too. An OECD assessment of Korea points to wide gaps between men and women in jobs and pay, on top of heavy education and housing costs, as central to the career-versus-family choice women face. Jennifer D. Sciubba, president of the Population Reference Bureau, goes further, arguing that “Korea should acknowledge that its population issues are primarily gender issues”. The word “primarily” is contested, and the government has tended to frame the crisis in economic terms. Even so, her point captures something cash grants were never built to reach.

What 0.80 tells us, and what it doesn’t

The rebound is real. Births rose 6.8 percent in 2025, the largest annual jump since 2007. As of early 2026, births had risen year-on-year for an 18th straight month.

Demographers tend to read the uptick as an echo of the past rather than a policy win. In South Korea, marriages are a good early sign of coming births, and they jumped 14.9 percent in 2024, the biggest spike since records began in 1970. Some of that was weddings postponed during the pandemic finally happening. The rise is also driven by a fairly large cohort of women now in their early-to-mid 30s. The groups behind them are much smaller, which caps how long any rebound can last.

Sojung Lim, a Korean studies professor at SUNY University at Buffalo, names that ceiling plainly: “Now we see some rebound … but our levels never recovered (to what they were) before Covid. We still have the lowest fertility of advanced economies.” On whether the spending itself made a difference, she is openly sceptical: “If these structural issues are the real causes of Korea’s ultra-low fertility, then do these government policies really help? I don’t think so.” 

0.80 is a four-year high. It is also still the lowest fertility rate in the developed world, resting on a foundation set to shrink as those larger cohorts age out. The number that stopped demographers cold in 2023 has moved. The gap between what raising a child costs in South Korea and what a cheque can cover has not.