Multi-Child Russian Families Nearly Three Times as Likely to Be Poor than Russian Families as a Whole, Rosstat Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 4 – Judging from just released Rosstat figures, Russian couples who have three or more children are far more likely than their counterparts who decide to stop are fewer to end up poor, a pattern that will certainly undercut Vladimir Putin’s call for Russian women to have up to eight children.

    According to Rosstat, the Russian government’s statistical arm, more than 500,000 of the 2.65 million Russian families which have three or more children have incomes below the poverty line, approximately 20 percent of that group and nearly three times the 7.2 percent figure for all Russian households (moscowtimes.ru/2025/05/05/kazhdaya-pyataya-mnogodetnaya-semya-vrossii-okazalas-nischei-a162749).

    Clearly having more children makes it more likely that they and their families will land in poverty, and that means there will be further downward pressure on the fertility rate in Russia which is also well-below the replacement level of 2.2 children per woman per lifetime and in some major cities as low as 1.0.