Monday, 31, August, 2026

Uzbekistan's birth rate is projected to rise steadily over the next quarter-century, according to a long-term forecast released by the Family and Gender Research Institute. The number of babies born annually is expected to reach:

  • 892,700 in 2030;
  • 1,016,100 in 2040;
  • 1,234,100 in 2050.

That trajectory would put the 2050 birth count 354,500 higher than in 2025 — a 40.3 percent increase.

Regionally, Tashkent province and the city of Tashkent are projected to see the sharpest growth, at 62 percent and 61 percent respectively, followed by Andijan (48.6 percent), Samarkand (43.3 percent) and Namangan (42.4 percent) provinces. The overall birth rate is expected to dip slightly in the medium term before resuming steady growth, rising from a projected 21.2 births per 1,000 people in 2030 to 21.9 per 1,000 by 2050, with Surkhandarya (24.7) and Kashkadarya (23.8) provinces likely to post the highest rates in the country.

Researchers say this demographic growth will place mounting pressure on education, healthcare, preschool services, housing, social services and labor-market infrastructure in the years ahead, and that anticipating these shifts now will allow the government to allocate resources more efficiently and plan human-capital investment more strategically.

But the forecast's near-term numbers sit uneasily alongside the most recent data available. Uzbekistan recorded 373,389 live births in the first half of 2026 — a 7.9 percent drop from the same period in 2025, according to the National Statistics Committee, and the steepest six-month decline anywhere in Central Asia. That follows a 5.1 percent fall for all of 2025 and a 3.7 percent decline in 2024, meaning the slide has been accelerating rather than leveling off, part of a pattern of consecutive quarterly declines that economists tie to shrinking cohorts of people reaching childbearing age — the echo of a birth-rate dip in the late 1990s — a demographic effect they expect to continue at least through 2027. Against that backdrop, the institute's projection of 892,700 births by 2030, roughly 13,000 more than were recorded in 2025, implies a fairly abrupt reversal of a trend that, so far this year, has been moving firmly in the opposite direction.

 

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