Births vs Deaths Across Europe

About This Chart

Data Visualization Method

• Data: Crude birth rates and crude death rates (live births and all-cause deaths per 1,000 people per year) from the UN World Population Prospects 2024, medium variant.
• Period and area: 2015–2025 for 15 European countries. Values for 2015–2023 are UN estimates. Values for 2024 and 2025 are UN medium-variant projections, not registered counts.
• Selection: The source covers 50 European countries and areas. Nine with fewer than 100,000 residents were removed first. From the remaining 41, 15 were chosen editorially for population size, geographic spread and demographic contrast. The other 26 were left out for readability, not because data was missing.
• Processing: Source values, published to three decimals, were rounded to two decimals for the chart and to one decimal for on-screen labels. Bars are ranked by the two-decimal values. Russia is shown as a single national series, as published by the UN.
• Chart form: An animated bar chart race with one frame per year. Each country has two bars, births in blue and deaths in red, and all 30 bars are ranked together, with the top 20 shown in each frame. A country's two bars move independently, and either one can drop out of view. Flags serve only as labels.

Creator's Note

This chart puts two numbers that are usually reported separately onto one ranking: how many people are born and how many die, relative to population size. On a single scale, it becomes easier to see where deaths have moved ahead of births, and when.

The sharpest shift in the underlying data is Ukraine's birth rate, which falls from 9.8 per 1,000 in 2015 to 5.6 in 2023. Its bar leaves the visible top 20 in 2017 and is the lowest of the 15 countries from 2022 onward, so the decline is clearer in the data than on screen. Death rates across much of Central and Eastern Europe peak in 2021 and ease afterward.

Across the group, deaths exceeded births in 8 countries in 2015 and in 10 in the 2025 projection. That leaves a question the chart cannot answer on its own: how much of Europe's future population change will come from births and deaths, and how much from movement across borders.

Data Sources

• UN World Population Prospects 2024 — crude birth and death rates, estimates and medium-variant projections. UN DESA, Population Division, CC BY 3.0 IGO.
• WPP 2024 Methodology — definitions of crude rates and the treatment of crisis mortality.
• WPP 2024 Data Sources — inputs behind the Ukraine estimates, including refugee statistics.
• UN M49 standard — regional classification of the Russian Federation.
• WHO Europe — timing of the COVID-19 pandemic.
• United Nations in Ukraine — date of the full-scale invasion, 24 February 2022.

Limitations

Crude rates divide events by the whole population, so they reflect age structure as much as fertility or mortality. A country with an older population can show a higher death rate without worse health outcomes. These rates are not age-standardized and should not be read as a ranking of health systems.

Values for 2024 and 2025 are projections and may differ from registered data published later. For Ukraine after 2022, both births and the population base are modeled under displacement and incomplete registration, and the UN series includes Crimea. Uncertainty for these years is considerably higher than for the other countries in the chart.

Labels are rounded to one decimal from two-decimal chart values. Bars with the same label can still differ in order, and a few labels may differ by 0.1 from rounding the three-decimal source directly. The 15 countries are an editorial selection, so any rank describes position within this group, not within Europe or the EU.

What This Chart Doesn't Show

The death rate counts deaths from all causes. In this series, Ukraine's death rate peaks in 2021, during the pandemic, and does not show a sustained rise after 2022. It is not a measure of war deaths, and it does not separate direct from indirect effects of the war. The 2021 peaks elsewhere coincide with the pandemic, but the data do not identify causes of death.

Only the top 20 of the 30 bars appear in each frame. Bars below the cutoff are still ranked but not drawn. Birth rates sit below death rates in most of these countries, so birth bars are the ones most often hidden: in the 2025 frame, 9 of the 15 birth bars, including Ukraine's, fall outside the view. A missing bar means a lower value, not missing data.

The gap between births and deaths is natural change only. It leaves out migration, so a country where deaths exceed births can still be growing, and the chart says nothing about total population change. The motion between yearly frames is an animated transition. Only the yearly values are data.