Birthrates are drying up about as fast as the Great Salt Lake — globally, nationwide, in Utah and in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

This much nearly all can agree on.

But by how much and why — that is where the debates emerge. The cost of living only moves in one direction: up. The same goes for the average age at time of first marriage, a trend unlikely to reverse anytime soon. And that’s to say nothing of the couples who want children but struggle to have them.

Here is our best attempt at prying the through lines from the best information available, starting with this: How do Latter-day Saints, traditionally famous for minivans where siblings sit two to a seat, compare to the general population when it comes to family size?

Birthrates among LDS vs. non-LDS

There is little doubt that Latter-day Saint families today are, on the whole, larger than average in the United States — and, in a notable number of cases, a lot larger.

Take the observation from data scientist Stephen Cranney that, as of 2024, 6.2% of Latter-day Saints had families with six or more kids. As the Catholic University researcher, who is also a Latter-day Saint, notes in his post about the finding, that number was far and away the largest of any religious group surveyed by the nationwide Cooperative Election Study that year, with Muslims claiming the silver medal at 2.8%.

A similar story emerges in the case of families with four kids, as statistician Ryan Burge demonstrated on his site, Graphs About Religion. Using the same data, Burge found that while Latter-day Saints make up an estimated 1.3% of all U.S. families, they account for 3.6% of families with four or more kids.

Other data backs up this large-family trend among Latter-day Saints.

This includes a nationwide survey of census data, which reveals that Latter-day Saint-majority counties average 14.6 births per 1,000 residents, compared to 11.9 wherever members of the Utah-based faith are in the minority.

[Read more: Experts and members discuss why Latter-day Saint couples are having fewer kids.]

Neither does this appear to be a quirk of Latter-day Saints living in the United States. Using admittedly limited data (between 100 and 160 respondents per continent) from the 2023 Global Flourishing Study, Mormon Metrics’ Alex Bass identified a “Latter-day Saint baby boost” in regions with relatively low fertility, Europe in particular.

How LDS birthrates have changed over time

So why all the fretting over at church headquarters?

The answer comes by putting current Latter-day Saint birthrates in historical context.

Data from the early 1980s put Latter-day Saints’ fertility rate at the time around 3.31 children per woman. By 2020, it was closer to 2.8.

Meanwhile, by mining what few statistics the church does make public, Bass recently uncovered a drop from nearly 24 births per 1,000 members worldwide in the 1980s to just five today.

The finding, however, comes with a disclaimer from Bass, who writes on his website that the decline, while “stark,” is likely not as extreme as these two snapshots might suggest. The reason he gives is the many who remain on church records but no longer attend, leaving their children untallied.

Researchers Jana Riess and Benjamin Knoll put a finer point on things, at least within the United States. Together, they uncovered a dip in the average number of children per family that respondents said they were raised in from 4.02 in 2016 to 3.45 in 2026. Fueling this change, they explain in their forthcoming book, “Leaving Mormonism: Who Is Exiting The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and Why,” was an uptick in the number of families with one or two kids, paired with a notable drop in families with five or more.

Drivers of change

As to why Latter-day Saints are having fewer kids, Bass examined multiple surveys and datasets to try to find the driving forces.

The top reason he came to is one church leaders have noticed and noted — members are marrying later in life, if at all.

A decade ago, the median age at the time of a first marriage for Latter-day Saints was 22, according to Riess and Knoll. Today, they peg that number at 23 (25 in the case of former members). At the same time, the percentage of married members between ages 18 and 45 has steadily declined from 66% in 2008 to 56% today, according to Cooperative Election Study data crunched by Bass.

Examining data from the Pew’s 2024 Religious Landscape Study, the statistician further observed that the less active people are in the faith, the fewer kids they are likely to have. Today’s Latter-day Saints are, on average, less certain in their beliefs and devout in their practice as their parents. Bass strings these data points together to argue that decreasing religiosity is a major contributor to the Latter-day Saint birthrate decline.

Finally, as any parent striving to simultaneously afford daycare and a home will tell anyone who will listen, economic instability is almost certainly playing a role in parents limiting family size, Bass argues, placing it third in terms of overall reasons for the slumping birthrate.

One point Bass doesn’t touch on: infertility.

Whether due to rising age of parents, environmental factors or a combination of the two, an average of 1 in 5 women in the United States struggle with infertility. Use of assisted reproductive technology has grown steadily in recent decades, adding to the costs of childbearing to already cash-strapped couples.

When there’s a will but no way

All of which points to an underlying reality that Tim Heaton, a now-retired sociologist at church-owned Brigham Young University, unearthed from General Social Survey data stretching back to the 1970s.

While each individual GSS includes only a few dozen Latter-day Saints, accumulating years of data can make conclusions more meaningful. And per Heaton’s analysis, yes, the number of children in Latter-day Saint families has fallen over time. Furthermore, the number of children considered ideal by Latter-day Saint adults among those who go to church more than monthly has also declined.

But many members — especially younger adults — want more kids. Among survey respondents under 35, 84% reported that the ideal family size was greater than their current number of children. And those Latter-day Saints who attend church more than monthly felt the ideal family size was still 1.1 children larger than those who went more rarely.

In other words, when church leaders call on those of child-rearing age to get busy, they are almost certainly speaking to a willing audience. That’s doubly true when considering that those taking the time to tune into special broadcasts likely fall into the more devout camp.

But willingness to bring new life into the world is one thing. The ability — be it financial, physical or emotional — is another.

What the church could do

Church leadership already has shown some creativity in trying to counteract the trend toward marrying later, lowering the minimum mission age for women, for example, so they can enter full-time church service at 18 like their male counterparts.

That is “part of the Lord’s plan to overcome the tendency of waiting until the late 20s to have a first marriage,” Oaks said of the change. “I think we will see a reduction in the age of marriages for Latter-day Saints.”

And, in 2024, a church-sponsored event shattered the Guinness World Record for largest speed-dating event (more than 2,000 participants joined in on the festivities hosted in downtown Salt Lake City).

But as Salt Lake Tribune guest columnist Natalie Brown has observed, there is more the church — as one of the world’s wealthiest private organizations — could do to relieve the financial strain on current and would-be parents.

Her suggestions range from operating discounted daycares out of church meetinghouses to free parenting classes and permitting struggling members to pay less in tithing.

In high-cost locales, why not operate, others have wondered, a housing fund in the spirit of the church’s Perpetual Education Fund?

As for fertility, the church already helps individuals in need pay for mental health services. Could it do the same for those seeking help to cover the cost of procedures like in vitro fertilization?

Additional investing in youth programs plus paying for young-adult missions (another of Brown’s suggestions) could potentially boost retention and reinforce devotion among the rank and file.

Bottom line, the church may need more engaged members, in every sense of the word, if it hopes to see its nurseries bustling with little ones anytime soon. The solution is likely as complicated and personal as the conversations unfolding every day between Latter-day Saint couples weighing their family’s future.