Total fertility rate (annual, Europe)

Annual total fertility rate - the mean number of children that would be born alive to a woman during her lifetime if she were to pass through her childbearing years conforming to the age-specific fertility rates of the given year - for EU member states, EFTA countries, EU candidate countries and EU/euro-area aggregates. Eurostat dataset demo_find ('Fertility indicators'), filtered to freq=A, indic_de=TOTFERRT ('Total fertility rate'). Each row is one (year, country). Method: Eurostat compiles the indicator from national vital-statistics registers; the TFR is a period measure, so it describes the fertility behaviour of a synthetic cohort, not any real generation of women. Units: children per woman. Caveats: the replacement level is about 2.1 children per woman in low-mortality populations - values below it signal long-run population decline absent net immigration; national breaks in vital-statistics series (e.g. territorial changes) are flagged in Eurostat metadata; early years are sparse for newer member and candidate countries. Non-EU/EFTA/candidate countries (the UK, Kosovo, Russia, Belarus) are dropped (same licensing rule as the other Eurostat datasets). Coverage: 45 geographic units after the geo rule, 1960 to the present (1,892 observations), annual. Provenance: Eurostat keyless JSON-stat API, free reuse with attribution (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU) - please cite Eurostat. Primary key: (year, country_code). Join keys: country_code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), year. Cadence: refreshed yearly; Eurostat updates the demographic indicators in autumn (2026-09-22 vintage covers 1960-2024). Sample use: filter country_code='FRA' to track the French fertility decline over time.