More Americans are choosing not to have children and remain childfree. But is it a nationwide trend? Researchers at Michigan State University have found that childfree people are more common in some states than others.
“We’ve known that childfree adults were a large and growing group in the United States, but not whether they were concentrated in certain places,” said Zachary Neal, professor of psychology at MSU and co-author of the study. “These new data show that there’s a lot of variation. One in five are childfree in California and Michigan, but only one in ten are childfree in Louisiana and the Dakotas.”
The study –– published in PLOS One –– used data from the Civic Health and Institutions Project, or CHIP. It focused on surveys from a nationally representative sample of over 20,000 adults covering all 50 U.S. states in 2024. The surveys made it possible to distinguish childfree people from people who plan to have kids in the future or who couldn’t have kids.