China recorded its lowest number of marriages in 18 years in the first nine months of 2026, official figures show, deepening concern in Beijing about a shrinking population and a birth rate that has already fallen to its lowest level since the founding of the People's Republic.
Figures published this week by the Ministry of Civil Affairs show that 4.65 million couples registered marriages between January and the end of September. That is 504,000 fewer than in the same period last year, a fall of 9.8 per cent, according to the South China Morning Post, which first reported the detailed breakdown of the data.
Local financial outlet Yicai, cited by Reuters, described the total as the lowest in 18 years. The figure is also the weakest first-nine-months total since the quarterly series began in 2008, falling below even the 4.747 million marriages recorded in the same period of 2024.
The decline gathered pace as the year went on. Marriage registrations fell 6.2 per cent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, 8.7 per cent in the second quarter and 14.9 per cent in the third quarter, according to figures reported by the Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao.
Divorces, meanwhile, moved in the opposite direction. Around 2.08 million couples registered divorces in the first nine months of the year, about 5,000 more than in the same period of 2025, the ministry's data showed.
The figures mark a setback for Beijing after marriage registrations briefly recovered in 2025, reversing a slide that had run for several years. Independent demographer He Yafu, based in Guangdong province, said the latest numbers suggested full-year marriage registrations were likely to fall again in 2026.
The marriage figures matter far beyond the wedding industry because, in China, having children remains closely tied to marriage. A fall in marriages today is widely seen as a warning of fewer births in the years ahead, and officials have been watching both trends closely as the population ages.
The birth figures already point in that direction. China recorded just 7.92 million births in 2025, down 17 per cent from 9.54 million in 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The birth rate dropped to 5.63 per 1,000 people, the lowest since the People's Republic was founded in 1949.
The country's population also fell by 3.39 million to around 1.405 billion in 2025, marking its fourth consecutive annual decline. Reuters has reported that the number of women aged 15 to 49, considered to be of reproductive age by the United Nations, is projected to fall by more than two-thirds to fewer than 100 million by the end of the century.
Beijing has rolled out a series of measures in recent years aimed at encouraging marriage and childbirth, including cash subsidies for families and efforts to ease the cost of raising children. The latest figures suggest those policies have yet to turn the trend around, and demographers say the challenge is structural: fewer young people are reaching marriage age, and many of those who do are delaying or choosing not to marry at all, citing the cost of housing, education and childcare, as well as job pressures.
What happens next will be watched in the full-year figures, due early next year, and in the 2026 birth numbers that follow them. If the marriage decline continues into the final quarter, as He Yafu expects, China is likely to record another fall in annual marriages — and, in time, another fall in births — adding to the demographic pressure on the world's second-largest economy.
