A total of 157 elementary schools across South Korea opened the 2024 school year with no first graders at all. The count came from the Ministry of Education, which also confirmed 369,325 enrolments that March, the lowest intake since records began in 1970. North Jeolla Province alone had 34 schools with nobody to enrol.

That intake drew largely on children born in 2017, when there were 357,771 births. By 2023 the annual count was 230,028 and the fertility rate had reached 0.72. The smallest intake on record came from the larger of those two birth years. The 2023 cohort starts school in 2030.

The 0.72 is where the 36 children come from. If a hundred adults, roughly fifty of them women, passed through their childbearing years at the age-specific rates observed in 2023, they would leave behind about 36 children. Each generation arrives at a bit over a third the size of the one that produced it. Seoul has run lower still, at 0.58 in 2024 and 0.63 in 2025.

What the rate measures

The total fertility rate is a snapshot of one year’s behaviour stretched across a hypothetical lifetime. It describes the present rather than the eventual family size of any real group of women, and it moves sharply when people postpone childbearing rather than forgo it. Demographers use it because it is comparable across countries and quick to compile.

The 0.72 was the lowest ever recorded by any country. Macau has gone lower, and it is a Chinese special administrative region rather than a sovereign state. Its locally registered rate, which runs below UN estimates for the territory, fell to 0.47 in 2025 on 2,871 births. Hong Kong has hovered near 0.7 in recent years. That places the Korean number in the right category without softening it.

Longer-run projections exist, and they are harder to read calmly. The OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2024 paper Korea’s unborn future, by Yang, Hwang and Pareliussen, draws on OECD-wide policy experience and puts the population halving by 2082, falling to around a third of its present size by 2100. Those are model outputs, sensitive to migration and to any shift in behaviour, and the authors treat them as such.

Why the schools show it first

Population statistics stay abstract until they turn up as an empty classroom with a whiteboard in it.

Schools register a birth cohort six years on, and there is nothing ambiguous about the count. By August 2025, ministry data showed 400 of the country’s 6,288 elementary schools with one new pupil or none, double the 200 recorded in 2017. The number of children aged five to nine had fallen 18 per cent over the same period, dropping below two million.

The 2026 school year went further. Education Ministry data reported by Chosun Ilbo put 210 elementary schools with no first-year intake at all, up 81 per cent from 116 five years earlier. One was a working school in Seoul’s Gangseo District rather than a campus closed for rebuilding, a first for the capital. Nationally the March intake was projected at 298,178. That is a fall of 15.5 per cent on the ministry’s own 2024 count, and it dropped below 300,000 a year sooner than its published forecast had it.

Yonhap and Chosun Ilbo also reported entrance ceremonies held for a single child. One school in Pyeongchang County has 18 pupils in total and has folded two year groups into a single class. Seven pupils arrived this year through a provincial rural study programme aimed at city families.

What the research points to

The OECD published two related pieces in 2024, and they do different jobs. The Yang, Hwang and Pareliussen paper argues that family policy, labour market structure and gender norms interact to define the career-family trade-off, and that strength in one does not compensate for gaps in the other two. Korea’s employment and wage gaps between men and women are among the widest in the OECD. Spending on private education and housing is unusually heavy.

The companion working paper, Women’s employment and fertility in Korea by Choi, Ham, Yang and Pareliussen, is a literature review, useful mainly for making Korean-language research legible to outside readers. Its central observation concerns a change in kind. Up to roughly 2010, women delayed marriage and childbirth and had fewer children, but nearly all eventually married and had at least one. From the 2010s, a growing share remain unmarried, or married without children.

The Yang, Hwang and Pareliussen paper also notes that surveys consistently find the number of children Koreans say they would ideally have exceeds the number they have. Whatever is driving the decline, it does not look like a straightforward loss of interest in children.

One peer-reviewed attempt to formalise the cost side is worth naming. Seongeun Kim, Michèle Tertilt and Minchul Yum, writing in the American Economic Review in June 2024, model private education spending as a status competition in which each family’s outlay raises the bar for everyone else. In their calibration, fertility would be 28 per cent higher without that externality. That is a model result rather than a measurement, and it rests on the assumptions they specify. It does put a number on a mechanism usually discussed as a mood.

The tutoring bill, read carefully

Household spending on private tutoring hit a record 29.2 trillion won in 2024, with participation at 80 per cent of students. In 2025 the total fell for the first time in five years, to 27.5 trillion won.

Three things moved at once. Student numbers dropped 2.3 per cent to 5.02 million, participation fell to 75.7 per cent, and monthly spending per participating student rose 2 per cent to a record 604,000 won. The Education Ministry pointed to expanded after-school programmes as one possible factor, while saying no single cause could be isolated.

The per-participant line is the one that has not turned.

The uptick, and the marriage numbers

The record low was set in 2023. Since then the rate has risen to 0.75 in 2024 and 0.80 in 2025, on 254,457 births, the highest in four years. Average maternal age reached 33.8. The provisional data came from the Ministry of Data and Statistics, the reorganised successor to Statistics Korea.

Marriages are the indicator officials themselves watch, since births in Korea remain closely tied to them with a lag of a year or two. In 2025, 240,300 couples married, up 8.1 per cent and the most in seven years. That was a third consecutive annual rise, following the 14.9 per cent jump in 2024. Hong Sok-chul, an economist at Seoul National University, attributes much of it to what is often called the echo boom: the group born between 1991 and 1996, during a brief upturn in births, is now reaching prime marrying age.

That group will pass through. The ones behind it are smaller, which caps how long the mechanism can hold, and 0.80 does not refill a school that had no first graders in 2026.

Two things will test the trend: the 2026 marriage count, and whether the fertility rate holds once the echo-boom group ages out of its thirties. Provisional annual data is released each February.