What the figure measures, and what it does not
The total fertility rate is not a count but a calculated value. The INE adds up the age-specific fertility rates of all women aged 15 to 49 in a calendar year and derives from them how many children a woman would have if she followed exactly those rates throughout her life. Nobody lives like that; the indicator is a snapshot of 2024, not a forecast. One property of this construction is decisive: because each age group is weighted separately, the result does not depend on how old the population is overall. A region therefore does not have a low fertility rate because it counts many older people. The INE's second measure, births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, also places the Canaries last, at 22.58 against 29.79.
Not an ageing story
The obvious explanation does not hold. The Canary population is not shrinking: it grew by 7.5 per cent between 2015 and 2025, to 2,258,866 people. Nor can the islands be classed as a particularly old region: the median age stood at 45.73 years in 2025 against 45.83 for Spain. Anyone wanting to explain the low fertility rate by ageing or depopulation finds no support in the data. And because the population is growing while the rate falls, that growth comes from people moving in.
Where the decline actually sits
The INE breaks the fertility rate down by birth order. Of the 0.82 children, 0.47 fell to the first child in the Canaries in 2024, 0.27 to the second and 0.06 to the third. Since 2015 the first-child figure has fallen from 0.61 to 0.47 and the second-child figure from 0.35 to 0.27: of the total decline of 0.25, therefore, 0.14 falls to the first child, a good 56 per cent — our calculation from table 1441. The decade's decline is first of all a decline in first births. Set against Spain, though, the picture shifts: there the first-child figure is 0.57 and the second 0.39. Of the 0.28 points of difference, 0.10 falls to the first child and 0.12 to the second, so the Canary shortfall is larger at the second child. A pure postponement story is also undercut by the age of mothers: Canary women have their child at 31.90 years on average, some eight months earlier than the Spanish average of 32.61 (INE 2024, table 1580).
Income, rent, childcare
What can be documented are the conditions in which such decisions are made. Canary median pay in 2024 was 20,631.84 euros gross a year, last of the 17 autonomous communities, according to the INE earnings structure survey of 28 May 2026. On leaving the parental home, the Observatorio de Emancipación of the Consejo de la Juventud records a Canary figure of 14.1 per cent for the second half of 2024, below the Spanish 15.2 per cent. The same report puts the median net income of a young Canarian at 947.06 euros a month and an average rent at 1,128 euros, or 119.1 per cent of that income. Childcare comes on top: in the 2025/26 school year 34.6 per cent of under-threes in the Canaries attended a first-cycle infant education centre, against 50.2 per cent across Spain, according to the Ministry of Education — the third lowest figure after Ceuta and Asturias. It is not automatic, though: Galicia has the highest rate in Spain at 63.9 per cent and at the same time one of the lowest fertility rates, 0.96.
Immigration, the 2026 estimate and policy
A widespread assumption is reversed by the statistics: the fertility rate of women of foreign nationality in the Canaries was 0.99 in 2024, that of women of Spanish nationality 0.78. Immigration therefore holds the overall figure of 0.82 up; without it, it would be lower. For the current year the INE published an expressly provisional estimate on 16 September 2026: from January to July 2026 an estimated 6,500 births were recorded in the Canaries, 1.92 per cent fewer than in the same period a year earlier, while Spain rose by 1.39 per cent. Only five of the 19 territories registered a fall: Galicia by 3.50 per cent, Melilla 3.25, Ceuta 2.41, the Canaries 1.92 and Castilla-La Mancha 0.45. To the same seven months the INE assigns 11,142 deaths, likewise estimated, which leaves a natural loss of 4,642 — our subtraction from two provisional series. The regional government presented the Estrategia Canaria de Reto Demográfico y Cohesión Territorial in 2025, but its focus is on rural depopulation rather than on the fertility rate.