Housing Constraints, Cohabitation Pathways, and Early Fertility in the Netherlands: A Longitudinal Study

Neils Kooiman , Statistics Netherlands

Fertility in the Netherlands has declined sharply over the past 15 years, with the total fertility rate decreasing from 1.8 children per woman in 2010 to slightly above 1.4 in 2024. This study focuses on women who have entered co-residential unions and examines whether they have fewer children in the early years of cohabitation than a decade ago, with particular attention to their housing trajectories in an increasingly strained housing market. We address four main questions: (1) how the share of cohabiting women who have a child within the first eight years of co-residence has changed since 2012; (2) how the prevalence of unions in which one partner moves into the other’s dwelling has evolved; (3) how long it takes cohabiting couples to move to a subsequent dwelling and how this depends on their mode of entry into cohabitation; and (4) how the interval between the start of cohabitation and the birth of the first child differs between couples who form a joint household and those who begin with partner moving in, and how this interval has changed since 2012. To answer these questions, we conduct a longitudinal study based on the Dutch Labour Force Survey (LFS) micro-linked to register data, enabling detailed reconstruction of partnership and housing trajectories over time. We hypothesize that housing market tightness reduces couples’ ability to secure a new dwelling together, increasing the likelihood of partner-moving-in unions. We further expect that such unions face greater obstacles in moving on to a preferred home, with implications for early fertility.

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 Presented in Session P2. Families, Fertility, and the Life Course 2