Pakistani women are marrying and starting families later. But the childbearing window stays wide open.

Gallup Pakistan Digital Analytics Pulled Pakistan’s DHS microdata from 1990-91 and 2017-18 to see how the key milestones of women’s reproductive lives have shifted over nearly three decades.

The numbers:

→ Median age at first marriage: 18.0 → 19.0 years → Median age at first birth: 20.0 → 21.0 years → Median age at last birth: 36.2 → 33.8 years

On the surface, this looks like steady, modest progress — women are marrying about a year later and starting families about a year later than they were in 1990-91.

But look at the third number. Age at last birth has barely moved — down just 2.4 years in 27 years, compared to a full year’s shift on the marriage and first-birth side. Pakistani women aren’t just marrying and starting families a bit later. Many are still having children well into their mid-to-late 30s, the same way they were nearly three decades ago.

That’s not a footnote — it’s the real story here. A childbearing window that stretches from the early 20s to the late 30s carries real implications: more total pregnancies over a woman’s reproductive life, higher-risk later pregnancies, and less recovery time between births. It also lines up exactly with what we’ve seen in Pakistan’s family-size data — large families are shrinking, but slowly, and this is a big part of why.

Data: Pakistan Demographic and Health Surveys 1990-91 and 2017-18 (NIPS).