Human Fertility Database
The Human Fertility Database (HFD) is the leading scientific data resource on fertility in the developed countries. This open access database provides detailed and high-quality historical and recent data on period and cohort fertility by age of mother and birth order. The HFD is entirely based on official vital statistics and places a great emphasis on rigorous data checking and documentation. The HFD adopts uniform methodology to warrant data comparability across time and between countries. The database follows open data principles.
For users who seek fast access to the most commonly used summary indicators of period and cohort fertility, we provide excel tables comprising the following indicators for all the HFD countries:
HFD summary indicators
We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present, the database contains detailed period and cohort fertility data for the following countries:
Data by country
The HFD will be continually updated and more countries will be added with time. Below we present countries which are on our "coming next" list. For these countries we provide only age-specific fertility rates based on the original official data. Please be aware that these data have not been fully processed, checked, and corrected and may not be free of mistakes and biases.
Preliminary release
News
Data were updated for Belgium and Taiwan through 2021, for Japan and Portugal through 2022, and for Denmark through 2023
HFD in zipped data files
To facilitate rapid downloads, the database has been organized into zipped data files.