This Is the State Where the Fewest People Were Born in 2020

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Feb 9, 9:30AM EST

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This Is the State Where the Fewest People Were Born in 2020 — © FG Trade / E+ via Getty Images

According to the most recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Births: Final Data for 2020, which is the most recent data available, 3,613,647 births were registered in the United States. That was down 4% from 2019. It also was 56.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The information came from birth certificates.

The objective of the study: “This report presents 2020 data on U.S. births according to a wide variety of characteristics. Trends in fertility patterns and maternal and infant characteristics are described and interpreted.”

The report contains a large amount of information. This includes the age of the mother, race, birth order and “total fertility rate,” which was 1,641.0 births per 1,000 women. The information gathered also included whether the mothers smoked, the source of payment for delivery (primarily Medicaid or private insurance), birth rate, whether children were delivered prematurely and if mothers were single or married.
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Among the good news was data about smoking. “Of the women who gave birth in 2020, 5.5% reported smoking cigarettes (tobacco only) at some point while pregnant, an 8% decline from 2019 (6.0%).”

One part of the analysis included births by state. These, in turn, were divided by the race of the mother: white, Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, Asian and Hispanic. Of the 3,613,647 births, the largest number of mothers were white (1,843,432), followed by Hispanic (866,713) and Black (529,811).

The state with the fewest births was Vermont at 5,133. The state with the most births was California. Its 420,259 was 12% of the national total.

These are the 20 states with the fewest births in 2020:

Vermont (5,133)
Wyoming (6,128)
District of Columbia (8,874)
Alaska (9,469)
North Dakota (10,059)
Rhode Island (10,101)
Delaware (10,392)
Montana (10,791)
South Dakota (10,960)
Maine (11,539)
New Hampshire (11,791)
Hawaii (15,785)
West Virginia (17,323)
Idaho (21,533)
New Mexico (21,903)
Nebraska (24,291)
Connecticut (33,460)
Nevada (33,653)
Kansas (34,376)
Arkansas (35,251)

Click here to see America’s most popular baby girl names in 2020.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.