Seniors 65 years old and over have been outnumbering children aged 5 or under across the world since 2023 — this stat was published by the United States Census Bureau in early September and was widely reported . The United Nations have actually included the 2023 switch that is illustrative of wider demographic trends in their data since 2024, but the news was mostly ignored then.

Irrespective of the timing, the unprecedented reversal of the size of older and younger population groups across the world is marching ahead quickly, heightening fears of economic decline, eroding pensions and a health care meltdown. In 2019, UN numbers showed that the generation 65+ for the first time outnumbered children between the ages of 0 and 4. Two data revisions later, this changeover has now retroactively been moved forward as far as 2012, marking yet another instant of fertility projections that had to be corrected downwards .

Next year, those 65 years and older are projected to outnumber children aged 6 and under, as worldwide demographic change is speeding up even more. The Census Bureau in its release An Aging World: 2025 states that this transformation that is “unprecedented in human history” will be “one of the most significant changes and challenges for many societies in the coming decades”.

The UN in its World Population Prospects 2024 report focuses more on the age group 65+ outnumbering minors under the age of 18. The UN projects this to become a reality from 2078, but it could also happen sooner when following models that predict more aggressive population decline. The UN says that countries which were already experiencing a shrinking population (or are projected to see their population size start to fall in the coming decades) “should consider leveraging technology, including automation, to improve productivity at all ages” and “should also design more opportunities for lifelong learning and retraining” to foster opportunities for people to work longer.

The report’s suggestion that gender equality and women’s empowerment can help counter both rapid population growth and decline exemplifies the confusion around solutions for falling population sizes. While women’s access to autonomy and contraception put global fertility into a tailspin in decades past, the notion that more equal partnerships and better government support for women and families will motivate them to have more children as financial and care work burdens ease has gained popularity recently. Yet, government efforts like these have fallen flat again and again, begging the question of whether the (sometimes costly) effort is worth it.

As researchers were able to refine their models of population growth over the past decades and centuries, these have been known to work quite well. The newer field of fertility and population decline meanwhile is more of an untested water with more room for error . However, predictions had to almost exclusively be corrected in the direction of a steeper decline than previously thought. This might be rooted in the history of demographic institutions. The UN Population Division, for example, long dedicated itself to fighting global overpopulation, causing some observers to suspect it has had a hard time changing course completely and giving up models that assume stabilizing populations as a default . This means that the predictions presented above have a high probability of coming true even sooner, making the message that countries need to act on these upcoming challenges even more pressing.