The average American woman having her first baby in 2023 was 27.5 years old, up from 26.6 in 2016 and a full six years older than the 21.4-year average recorded back in 1970. That trajectory, tracked in a new National Vital Statistics Report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, is not a blip tied to one recession or one pandemic year. It is a five-decade climb that has quietly rewritten the timeline couples assume for marriage, careers, and starting a family, and it shows no sign of leveling off. If you feel like everyone around you is having kids later than their parents did, the data says you’re not imagining it.
Seven Years, Point Nine Years Older
The CDC’s report, covering 2016 through 2023, found the mean age at first birth rose nine-tenths of a year in that seven-year window alone. Underneath that topline number is a bigger structural shift: births to first-time mothers age 35 and older rose 25% over the same period, while births to first-time mothers under 25 fell 26%. Those two trends moving in opposite directions at nearly identical magnitudes is the real story. Fewer young women are having their first child, and meaningfully more women are waiting until their mid-thirties or later, a pattern ABC News reported puts the average age of all mothers, not just first-time mothers, at 29.6 as of 2023.
Zoom out further and the shift looks even more dramatic. Research from Bowling Green State University’s National Center for Family and Marriage Research found the national mean age at first birth was just 21.4 in 1970 and had already climbed to 26.8 by 2017. Combined with the CDC’s more recent data showing it kept rising to 27.5 by 2023, American women having their first child today are, on average, waiting more than six years longer than their counterparts did in 1970.
The Gap Between Groups Is Widening, Too
The national average obscures how unevenly this shift is landing. By race and ethnicity, Asian mothers saw the largest increase between 2016 and 2023, climbing from 30.1 to 31.5 years, a jump of 1.4 years. White mothers rose from 27.4 to 28.3, Black mothers from 24.8 to 25.9, and Hispanic mothers from 24.7 to 25.7. Geography splits just as sharply: mothers in large metropolitan areas averaged 28.5 years at first birth by 2023, compared with 24.8 in the most rural counties, a gap of nearly four years. The BGSU analysis found that same geographic gap has been widening for decades, growing from 2.3 years between the youngest and oldest states in 1970 to 5.6 years by 2010.
Why Couples Are Waiting
Dr. Andrei Rebarber told ABC News that the shift reflects people “choosing when to have their children often based on financial stability, timing of stable relationships, various personal goals, and career aspirations,” rather than any single factor. That framing matches the pattern underneath the CDC numbers: this is fundamentally a story about relationship timelines shifting, not just fertility choices in isolation. Couples are marrying later, spending more years building financial footing before committing to a mortgage-and-nursery version of adulthood, and increasingly treating career stability as a prerequisite for parenthood rather than something to figure out alongside it.
What This Means Beyond the Nursery
This shift in maternal age doesn’t happen in isolation from everything else going on in modern relationships. It tracks alongside the rise of dual-income marriages, the growing share of couples splitting earnings roughly evenly, and the broader trend of Americans marrying later than previous generations did. Waiting longer to have a first child generally means more years of a relationship spent as a two-person unit before it becomes a three-or-more-person household, which changes how couples build financial habits, divide labor, and negotiate expectations before kids ever enter the picture.
None of this data says later is better or worse. It says later is now normal, and the couples navigating that timeline are doing so without the same generational playbook their parents had, since their parents’ playbook was built for a version of adulthood that, on average, arrived six years earlier than it does today.
