Costa Rica is undergoing a demographic transformation that will leave a lasting mark on the country. Families are smaller, parents are starting later in life, and a growing share of households no longer include children at all. The shifts, captured in recent data from the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC), are reshaping the structure of the Costa Rican home and raising pointed questions about the country’s social and economic future.
In 2025, Costa Rica recorded a fertility rate of just 1.2 children per woman, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the six children per woman documented decades ago. The drop is not an isolated statistic. It is part of a broader transformation in how Costa Ricans are forming households, and the numbers make the trend impossible to ignore.
Of the roughly 1.8 million households in the country, 14 percent — nearly 270,000 homes — are made up of couples without children. The profile of these households, however, is far from uniform.
“There are two types of these couples: young people who are deciding whether to expand their family, and older adults, some of whom are experiencing the phenomenon known as the ’empty nest’ when their children grow up and leave home,” said Gilbert Brenes of the Central American Population Center at the University of Costa Rica.
The picture broadens further when single-person households and two-person homes are added to the mix. Together, they account for more than 800,000 households, or 44 percent of all homes in the country — a striking indicator of just how much the traditional family unit has shifted.
A Generation Becoming Parents Later
The change is not only about household size. It is also about timing. In 1993, the average age for becoming a mother in Costa Rica was 23. By 2000, it had dropped to 21. By 2025, it had climbed to 28, and demographers expect that figure to keep rising in the years ahead.
The number of children per family has shifted just as dramatically. Where Costa Rican women had an average of six children in 1950, today that figure has fallen to 1.6 — well below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to keep a population stable without migration.”We’re seeing a generation of older adults with very young children,” said Irene, a Costa Rican mother who is living the trend firsthand.
The implications stretch well beyond the kitchen table. With fewer children in each home, every working-age Costa Rican will eventually shoulder a larger share of elder care and social security contributions for the generations above them. Demographers refer to this dynamic through the lens of the replacement rate, and Costa Rica has now slipped clearly below the threshold needed to sustain the system as it currently operates.
Our country is, in other words, heading toward a future in which younger generations will face mounting pressure — financial, logistical, and emotional — to support an aging population that will only continue to grow as a share of the whole.
