The Office for National Statistics put the population of England and Wales at 62,009,993 in mid-2025, an increase of 224,874 people over the year. In percentage terms that is growth of 0.364%, and the bulletin and the wire coverage that followed it described the figure as the slowest since mid-2020.
That is true and it undersells the result. ONS publishes, alongside the bulletin, a spreadsheet containing the annual population of England and Wales for every year from 1838. Computing the year-on-year change across all 188 rows places mid-2025 below every year since 1999 except one — 2020, when growth fell to 0.190% as the pandemic closed borders and killed tens of thousands of people. Step past 2020 and the next slower year is 1998, at 0.311%. This is, in other words, the slowest population growth England and Wales have recorded in any year not disrupted by a pandemic since 1998.
The qualifier is load-bearing and does not survive being dropped: 2020 was slower, and it falls inside the same window. The claim is specifically about non-pandemic years.
The other headline figure from the release travels badly in the opposite direction. There were 588,000 births, the fewest since 1978, which sounds like a demographic cliff and is reported as one. But mid-1978’s population of England and Wales was 49,442,500, against just over 62 million now — a quarter smaller. The same count of babies against a far smaller base was a materially higher birth rate: about 11.9 births per thousand people then, against 9.5 now. The raw counts are similar; the rates are not close.
Net migration is the mechanical explanation for the slowdown, having fallen sharply from the post-2021 peak that produced several of the fastest growth years in the series. Because natural change — births minus deaths — is now close to flat, migration has become almost the whole of the variance in the annual figure, which is why the growth line has moved so violently in both directions over four years.
The estimates come with a real caveat that ONS states plainly: figures from mid-2022 onward are subject to regular revision as the methods for estimating internal and international migration develop. The 2025 number is the most likely of the series to move, and the ranking against 1998 is close enough that a revision of a few tens of thousands would change it.
What does not depend on the revision is the shape. Four years ago England and Wales were growing at close to 1% a year, at the top of the post-war range; today the rate is a third of that and back in the company of the late 1990s, when the country was adding fewer than 200,000 people a year and public planning assumed it would stay that way.