Australians are at risk of being ‘priced out’ of parenthood, expert warns

The cost of raising children has become so high that parents and those hoping to become them are being forced to shrink their intended family size, Australia’s leading parenting advocate says.

New data from national advocacy organisation The Parenthood shows the cost of raising one child per year now sits at around $17,800 a year, and two or more costs more than $36,500.

Georgie Dent, a mother of three and chief executive of The Parenthood, will address the National Press Club on Wednesday warning that Australians are at risk of being priced out of parenthood. It comes two days after Treasury released its latest intergenerational report , which forecasts the nation’s steep birth rate decline will reshape the economy in coming decades.

“The birth rate has plummeted and a significant part of that drop is not in desire, it’s in affordability,” Dent told this masthead. “Parents are genuinely beside themselves; so many families are very genuinely squeezed.”

The intergenerational report predicts that the national fertility rate will drop to 1.34 by 2065-66 (a fertility rate of 2.1 is needed for the population to be replaced from one generation to the next without migration), meaning deaths would outnumber births. This compares with the stated wish of Australian men and women to have more children : “Men want exactly two kids, and for women it’s 2.1 – but that’s not what’s happening,” Dent said.

Australia is already wrestling with rock bottom birth rates, which fell by 25 per cent to a record low of 1.48 in 2024 from a peak of 2.02 in 2008.

Dent says that without better access to childcare , a big increase in paid parental leave and more support from workplaces, this will only worsen.

The Parenthood’s research, commissioned analysis from consultancy ConnellGriffin, found that over the last two decades, the cost of running a family has risen 32 per cent higher than family incomes grew over the same period.

“What it actually takes to run a family has risen 134 per cent, but the money that lands in the bank each week has risen only 102 per cent [in the last two decades],” Dent will say in her Press Club address.