A thousand births, arranged by the mother's age
Romania, 2022 · one dot ≈ 188 births
The dot field failed to load. All its numbers are in text, below.
Each dot is one thousandth of a year of births.
The thousand dots are all live births registered in Romania in 2022 — 188,322 — scaled down proportionally. They sit in columns, one per maternal age group. The tallest column, 30–34, holds 23.4% of the year's births.
Move the slider and watch the same dots migrate.
In 1990, 59.9% of births were to mothers under 25; by 2022, only 29.2%. The share at 30 and over rose from 19.0% to 44.0%. Dots never vanish and reappear: they move, column by column.
Switch to birth order: same population, different question.
The share of first births rose from 43.5% to 52.6%. Switch back to age and colour by birth order: each column shows whether it's the mother's first child, second, or more — the same age group can hold a very different mix.
The mix by birth order
Same age group, different make-up
Among young mothers, almost every birth is a first. Among older mothers, the column is mixed: a first child sits next to a third or fourth.
The official mean age at first birth rose from 22.3 in 1990 to 27.6 in 2022 — a jump of over five years. Second births stayed roughly stable, around 29.7% of all births; third and later, 17.7%.
Birth order counts the mother's own children, regardless of whether older siblings are still alive. INS categories run up to "10th and beyond"; the page groups them into four (1, 2, 3, 4 and beyond) for readability, without losing any birth from the count.
Not just fewer young women
Fertility shifted too, but less
The distribution of the thousand dots tells you what share of births comes from each age group. It doesn't tell you how likely a woman in that group is to give birth — for that, INS publishes the fertility rate: births per 1,000 women in that age group.
1990 2022
The age group with the highest fertility rate shifted from 20–24 to 25–29 — a single step, versus the raw distribution's two steps (from 20–24 to 30–34, above). The difference shows that part of the dot field's shift comes from today's young female cohorts being smaller, not only from a change in reproductive behaviour. The calendar of births really did change, but by less than the raw count suggests.
Two Romanias
Urban and rural
In 2022, the gap between the mean age at first birth in urban and rural areas was 3.8 years.
Urban Rural
The fertility curve follows the same shape in both settings, but shifted: the urban curve peaks at a higher age group than the rural one. Births haven't moved at the same pace everywhere in the country.
Choose your county
The map behind the national average
The national average hides very different counties. Bucharest has 63.0% of its births to mothers 30 and over, against 44.0% nationally.
Romania · 2022
County-level data starts in 1993 (INS publishes only the national total for 1990–1992); for 1993–1995, Bucharest and Ilfov are missing from the county breakdown.
What about the fathers?
Mother's age and father's age
For each birth, INS also records the father's age, in five-year groups. The matrix below shows, for 2022, what share of births falls into each combination.
The "unknown/not stated" row gathers births where the father's age wasn't recorded; it isn't dropped from the count, only shown separately. The source is usual residence (POP201I), available only from 2012 — it doesn't compare directly with the domicile-based series used elsewhere on this page.
Method and limits
How this was counted
The figures come from the National Institute of Statistics, TEMPO Online, tables POP201C, POP201B, POP201F, POP203A, POP201I and POP201J, downloaded directly on 9 September 2026. INS defines a live birth as the product of conception which, after separation from the mother, shows a sign of life — breathing, a heartbeat, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or voluntary muscle movement. Birth order counts the mother's own live-born children, regardless of whether older siblings are still alive.
Age groups are exactly the ones INS publishes (under 15, 15–19, 20–24 … 45–49, 50 and over); the page does not invent individual ages within a group. A dot's position inside its column is a layout choice, not statistical information — two dots in the same age group don't have different "ages" from each other.
The thousand dots are split with the largest-remainder method (Hamilton), verified to always total exactly 1,000. The fertility rate (births per 1,000 women in an age group) is a different indicator from the dot distribution: the first tells you how likely a woman in that group is to give birth in a year; the second tells you what share of all births falls to that group. The page does not conflate them, nor does it claim that births "chose" to come later — only that they moved.
Four limits that matter
2023 is completely missing. Verified directly at the source: POP201C, POP201B, POP201F, POP201I and POP201J carry no row at all for 2023 — not a zero value, an empty query. Only the fertility-rate table covers 2023. The year slider skips it.
2024 and 2025 are provisional. INS revises a year's births with late registrations filed over the following years, up to four months into the third year after. At the time of download, 2024 and 2025 are still inside that revision window — their figures may still rise. The page treats 2022 as "NOW," the last year INS marks "revised," even though the slider goes further.
The domicile-to-usual-residence break. Through 2011, the main series (POP201C/POP201B/POP201F) counted births to mothers domiciled in Romania; from 2012, domiciled or usually resident. The mother's-age-by-father's-age matrix (POP201I) uses a third definition, available only from 2012 — usual residence — and shouldn't be read as a direct continuation of the main series.
The father's age isn't always known. A share of births have the father's age recorded as "unknown/not stated." The page shows it as a separate row rather than dropping it from the count.
The page's numbers are generated directly from the recomputed data, not typed by hand, so they can't drift from the source. Full dataset, in table form: births by year, age and birth order · births by year, county and age.
Sources
What this draws on
- National Institute of Statistics, TEMPO Online, table POP201C — Live births by birth order, by mother's age group, 1990–2025, database, retrieved 9 September 2026.
- INS, TEMPO Online, POP201B — Live births by father's and mother's age group, by county, 1990–2025.
- INS, TEMPO Online, POP201F — Mean age of mother at birth, by area of residence, 1990–2025.
- INS, TEMPO Online, POP203A — Fertility rate by area of residence, age group and county, 1990–2025.
- INS, TEMPO Online, POP201I — Live births to mothers with usual residence in Romania, by father's and mother's age, 2012–2025.
- INS, TEMPO Online, POP201J — Live births to mothers with usual residence in Romania, by birth order and mother's age, 2012–2025, used to cross-check the matrix.