January 27, 2026
TAIPEI – On any given weekend, Kuan Hsin Park in Hsinchu city is filled with children cycling and playing on the swings. In nearby streets, young parents can be seen queueing outside music schools and tuition centres advertising “perfect American English” lessons, some anxiously peering in through the windows to spy on their children.
Demographically, Hsinchu is a rare outlier in Taiwan, which is currently facing a severe structural population decline with record-low birth rates.
According to Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior, the island’s overall birth rate has consistently fallen over the past decade, with its crude birth rate plummeting to 4.62 per 1,000 people in 2025, down from 5.76 a year earlier. In 2025, the total number of newborns hit a record low of 107,812.
While the ministry has yet to release its total fertility rate (TFR) – or the number of children a woman has in her lifetime – the 2025 figure is projected to have fallen below 0.8, based on monthly government data. That would make Taiwan’s figure the lowest in the world, as the TFR for the previous record holder, South Korea, is expected to surpass 0.8 in 2025.
But it is a different story in Hsinchu city, which lies south-west of Taipei and is home to the famed Hsinchu Science Park, often referred to as Taiwan’s Silicon Valley.
For several years, Hsinchu’s total fertility rate has hovered around one child per woman.
It is also the only city in Taiwan where the number of children under 14 exceeds that of seniors. The city has the highest proportion of children to the total number of residents, with 15.7 per cent of the roughly 450,500 people in the city aged below 14. This is well above the island’s average of 11 per cent.
“Hsinchu has all the right elements in place for a family to have children, and it’s not just because the engineers there have so much money, although that is very important,” said Professor Emeritus Wang Lih-rong, a family demographer at National Taiwan University.
Chip engineers typically earn well above average wages in the booming semiconductor industry, giving young professionals the financial confidence to start a family.
According to London-headquartered Capital Economics, wages in Taiwan’s electronics sector are around 70 per cent higher than the economy-wide average, fuelled by record-breaking profits driven by strong demand for the island’s cutting-edge chips and related IT products.
Other perks and support from industry giants including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and smartphone chipset supplier MediaTek, which are sited in the science park, also play a big part in encouraging births.
“Competition to retain the best workers is very tough, so tech companies in Hsinchu often offer comprehensive childcare services and other family-related benefits, which gives parents more breathing room,” Prof Wang told The Straits Times.
According to TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip producer, its employees make up only 0.3 per cent of the island’s population, but were responsible for 1.8 per cent of all newborns in 2023. This means that nearly one in 50 Taiwanese newborns that year was a “TSMC baby”.
The company offers free on-site childcare services as well as pre-school for children aged two to six at four different locations. On weekends, the facilities run science camps.
Over at MediaTek, employees are given baby bonuses and baby product hampers for every new child born.
At chip design company Novatek, employees with children under the age of six receive a subsidy of NT$5,000 (S$200) every month, and the option of a flexible hybrid working arrangement where they can work from home for up to 15 days a year.
“These companies are sending a strong signal that they support employees having children, and that it won’t negatively impact their career,” said Prof Wang. “This makes employees more likely to want to have children.”
Mr Jay Tsai, an engineer who works at the science park, said that most of the households in his apartment building have children.
“Almost all the neighbours’ families look like mine – where there are one or two engineer parents who have young children,” said the 42-year-old, who is married to the owner of a tutoring centre and has a 12-year-old.
“When you go to the malls around here, there are also young families everywhere,” Mr Tsai added, noting that popular schools are running out of room.
But Hsinchu’s relative success in encouraging more childbirth is more an exception than the norm in Taiwan.
For Taipei-based fitness instructor Zoe Huang, 27, having children is something she hopes to do some day – but only if she and her fiance manage to buy a home first.
“We’re barely saving enough for ourselves right now, let alone being able to raise a child,” she said.
Purchasing a home before getting married and starting a family is the norm in Taiwan, as property is seen as a prerequisite for a stable and secure life. But the reality of high housing costs has made this increasingly difficult.
In 2024, Taiwan’s housing price-to-annual-income ratio hit a record high of 10.76 – with the ratio in Taipei reaching 16.6, meaning that it would take a person more than 16 years to afford a home in the capital.
This comes as salaries for most workers outside the chip sector have remained stagnant for years, with real wages growing by an annual average of just around 1 per cent over the past decade.
According to a November 2025 survey by popular job portal 1111, close to 70 per cent of respondents polled said they were unwilling to have children due to economic concerns. Housing costs, in particular, were cited as the main pressure point.
The government has attempted to address the housing inequality issue, offering preferential home loans with lower interest rates for first-time buyers. But that does not address the barrier of the high down payment, which is typically 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the home’s value.
The government has also boosted baby bonuses to encourage births, including a newly announced cash payout of NT$100,000 for every baby born from 2026. That is on top of the cash handouts doled out by local city governments, depending on where the parents live; New Taipei City, for example, offers NT$40,000 for the first baby and NT$45,000 for a second child.
But many say such financial incentives are not enough.
Ms Huang, the yoga instructor, said: “A NT$100,000 baby bonus sounds generous, but it’ll burn through very quickly.”