The number of children adopted by families in Germany has dropped to its lowest point since national reunification, according to new figures released by the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) in Wiesbaden. A total of 3,517 children were adopted across the country in 2025, marking a decline of 145 cases, or four percent, compared to the previous year. The figures confirm that the long-running downward trend in German adoption numbers has not reversed.
This latest drop extends a pattern that stretches back more than three decades. Adoption numbers in Germany reached their historical peak in 1993, when 8,687 children were adopted nationwide. From that high point, the figure fell by more than half over the following sixteen years, settling into a comparatively stable range of roughly 3,500 to 4,100 cases annually from 2009 onward. Recent years, however, have shown a modest but persistent downward slide within that range.
Age data from 2025 shows that infants under one year old accounted for just over a quarter of all adoptions, at 27 percent, while children aged one or two made up a further 31 percent of cases. On average, children were five years and one month old at the time of adoption. Before being adopted, the majority of children, some 74 percent, had been living with a couple made up of one biological parent and one stepparent.
Around one in ten children came from a hospital or a mother-and-child facility, while eight percent had previously lived with a foster family. A smaller share of cases, three percent, followed an anonymous birth or the surrender of a child through a baby hatch, and two percent followed a period in residential care.
International adoptions remained rare, with only 56 children, or 1.6 percent of the total, adopted from abroad, most often from Thailand, South Africa, Burkina Faso, and Sri Lanka.
Even as overall adoption numbers continue to shrink, stepchild adoptions have become an increasingly dominant category. Between 2010 and 2025, their share of all adoptions climbed from 54 percent to 75 percent, the highest proportion on record. Destatis attributes much of this growth to stepmothers in same-sex partnerships formalizing their parental status.
In 2025 alone, 1,586 stepmothers adopted children, and in 80 percent of these cases the couples involved were female partners who had provided no information about a legal father. Cases of this kind made up 36 percent of all adoptions in 2025, a higher share than in previous years, reflecting the fact that a woman in a same-sex partnership can only gain full legal parental status for a child born into the relationship through a formal stepchild adoption, since German family law does not automatically recognize her as a second parent at birth.
Statisticians point to several underlying causes behind the overall decline in adoption figures, including shifting family structures, expanded state support for families, tighter child-protection regulations, and advances in reproductive medicine. A particularly notable contributor is the continued fall in so-called third-party adoptions, cases in which the adopting individuals are neither stepparents nor relatives of the child.
These adoptions dropped to a historic low of 819 cases in 2025. The number of children formally registered as available for adoption also hit a record low of 642, while adoption applications fell to 3,187. As a result, there were roughly five prospective adoptive families for every child registered for adoption in 2025, underscoring how far demand continues to outstrip the pool of children legally available for adoption in Germany.
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