Indianapolis is the US city with the highest birth rate, study finds, which could have an impact on its future

• Indianapolis has the highest birth rate among major US cities, per SmartAsset analysis.
• It used US Census data from 2021-2022 to compare birth rates in 37 large cities.

Indianapolis is the US city with the highest birth rate, according to a new analysis by the financial technology company SmartAsset.

SmartAsset analyzed the most recently available US Census data for 37 of the largest US cities to determine where birth rates and family sizes are the highest and lowest.

It looked at the number of women aged 15 to 50 who had a baby in the 12 months between 2021 and 2022, comparing this with the total number of women in that age bracket.

Indianapolis topped the list, with Seattle ranked lowest.

The data suggested that 6.5% of Indianapolis women aged 15 to 50 had a child in 2022, leading to 14,482 births. In Seattle, it was just 2.6%.

The study also found that birth rates in major cities were lower than the national average.

Birth rates are a crucial indicator of population growth.

"What's happening in the US is we have more people dying than birth in some of these metropolitan areas," Emilio A. Parrado, the director of the University of Pennsylvania's Population Studies Center, told BI.

Parrado emphasized that high birth rates in Indianapolis could have significant policy and urban planning implications.

These include preventing school closures, increasing demand for childcare, and "producing children that are going to maintain Indianapolis if they don't leave," he said.

Parrado said there was insufficient data in the analysis to directly attribute the higher birth rates to a particular cause, but factors such as domestic and international migration, as well as a high proportion of women of prime childbearing age, likely contribute.

Parrado also told BI that the study's limitation in not controlling for age makes it challenging to distinguish between the fertility rate and the population's age composition, and that a more precise measure would be the total fertility rate, which estimates the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime.

According to the most recent Indiana natality report, from 2017, Marion County, which includes Indianapolis, had a total fertility rate of 1.933, higher than the overall US rate of 1.62.

Many demographers and governments are concerned about declining fertility rates in the US and elsewhere.

Dudley L. Poston Jr., an emeritus professor of sociology at Texas A&M University, told BI that various factors influence fertility levels, including ethnicity, education, poverty status, employment outside the home, and whether women live in urban or rural areas.

Various countries around the world are experimenting with solutions to try to address low birth rates, including everything from unusual economic incentives to changing immigration policies.