INS data · births in Romania, day by day, 1995–2025
Pick your birthday to see where it ranks among the 365 dates of the year, by how often babies are born on it. The same data show how the birth calendar has changed: fewer and fewer babies are born at weekends, on public holidays, on the 13th of any month and on 29 February.
The ranking comes from 6,532,338 births registered in Romania between 1995 and 2025, counted by INS, the national statistics office. Add the year to see how many babies were born on your exact birthday.
Birthday
8of 31 years had this date
In the years it exists, 29 February has 22% fewer births than an average day. It has no rank, because it exists only in leap years.
Each bar is a year. It rises above the dotted line when more babies were born on that date than on an average day of that year.
31 years, day by day
Each row below is a year, from 1995 at the top to 2025 at the bottom. Each square is a day. The colour compares the day with that year's average: orange means more births, blue fewer.
In the mid-1990s the map is almost even. Only summer shows, a little more orange, and the end of December, in blue. Towards 2025 evenly spaced diagonal stripes appear: Saturdays and Sundays. They slant because each year shifts the weekdays by one place, and a leap year by two.
Comparing with each year's average matters because births fell, from 236,640 in 1995 to 145,725 in 2025. Without it, recent years would simply look paler.
The week
In 1995 the day of the week mattered little: a Sunday had 4% fewer births than an average day. In 2025 a Sunday had 33% fewer, and a Monday 18% more. The 2025 figures are still semi-final; in 2024, the latest final year, the gaps were almost the same: Sunday −32%, Monday +17%.
The day spontaneous labour begins is not scheduled. A planned caesarean or an induction, by contrast, can within limits be arranged for a particular day, usually a weekday, when the maternity ward has its full team. The INS table does not record how each baby was born, so it cannot show directly how much of the gap comes from caesareans or inductions. But the pattern is consistent with a growing share of births whose timing can be scheduled: the days that lose births are exactly the days an intervention can be moved away from.
Caesarean sections became much more common over the same period. Romania reported 23,883 of them to Eurostat in 1995 and 82,299 in 2023, while births fell by almost 30%. For comparisons between countries, Eurostat measures the procedure against population: in 2023 Romania recorded 431.8 caesareans per 100,000 inhabitants, against an EU average of 246.1; only Cyprus was higher, at 664.2 (Eurostat, surgical operations).
The same scheduling shows on the clock: Ora nașterii (in Romanian) shows births bunching up in the morning, as the working day starts.
Public holidays
From 2009 to 2024, six fixed dates became public holidays by law: 15 August, 30 November, 24 January, 1 June, and 6 and 7 January. Before, about as many babies were born on them as on the days around them. As days off they lose on average between 21% and 34% of their births. For 15 August, 30 November, 24 January and 1 June, every weekday year after the law sits below every weekday year before it.
Each dot compares births on a date with the average for the same weekday in the three weeks before and after, leaving out holidays and Christmas and New Year's Eve. Only years in which the date fell Monday to Friday are shown; weekends are emptier anyway. An open circle means the date coincided with Orthodox Easter or Pentecost, which are days off in any case.
Dormition of the Virgin · a day off since 2009
St Andrew · a day off since 2012
Union of the Principalities · a day off since 2017
Children's Day · a day off since 2017
Epiphany · a day off since 2024
St John · a day off since 2024
The holidays that were already days off in the 1990s needed no new law. Orthodox Easter Monday had 10% fewer births than the surrounding days in 1995–2004, and 34% fewer in 2015–2025. Christmas Day went from −13% to −39%, and 1 January from −8% to −39%. That is why the bottom of the ranking belongs to 25 December, 31 December, 1 January and 26 December.
Rare dates
No law makes the 13th a day off. Yet between 2015 and 2025 a 13th that fell on a weekday had on average 7% fewer births than the same weekday around it. In 1995–2004 the gap was 1%.
Tuesday the 13th, the unlucky day in Romanian tradition, does not stand out: every 13th from Monday to Friday loses between 5% and 9%. 13 April and 13 December are among the bottom 12 dates of the ranking.
29 February went the same way. In 1996 it had 4% fewer births than the surrounding days; in 2024, 39% fewer. In each of the eight leap years, 1 March had more births than the days around it, by 6% to 18%. Both patterns are consistent with some birth dates being chosen, through a scheduled caesarean or induction. The INS data do not show who chose the date, or why.
Fewer births
236,640 births in 1995, 145,725 in 2025. The fall does not change the ranking, because each day is compared with the average of its own year.
Two INS notes matter here. Since 2012 the count covers babies whose mothers had their domicile or usual residence in Romania and whose birth was registered in the country; before, the criterion was the mother's domicile. And the 2025 figures are semi-final: births registered late will still be added.
The ranking
Source and method