It’s a taxing time for sweethearts in China.
After a 30-year exemption, the country is slapping a 13% sales tax on condoms, birth control pills and devices, hoping to boost its declining birth rates and offset the long-term impact of an aging population and declining workforce.
And with contraception more expensive under the new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2026, officials are hoping other financial incentives help usher in a baby boom.
Changes include making childcare services, elder care institutions and disability service providers tax exempt; offering extended maternity leave, which varies across the country but has gone from 128 days to 158 days in big cities like Beijing, along with a proposed 30-day paid paternity leave.
On Jan. 1, 2025, each family became eligible to receive a cash allowance of 3,600 yuan, or about $500, per year for each child born after that date, Bloomberg reported.
A tough job market and the skyrocketing price of raising a child through age 18, an estimated 538,000 yuan or $76,000, also has young adults blowing off the bedroom.
China’s newly baby-friendly policies are in stark contrast to the infamous one-child policy the communist country cruelly implemented for decades, out of concerns that limited resources couldn’t keep up with a population which soared past the 1 billion mark decades ago.
Boys were the preferred sex, and female babies were often abandoned, neglected and even killed by their parents.
The policy led to the average birth rate in China plummeting until it reached only 6.77 births per 1,000 people in 2024.
Although the “one-child” policy ended in January 2016, China’s overall population — currently around 1.4 billion — recently declined for three consecutive years and could sink to 633 million by 2100.
There were 9.54 million births last year in China, about half the number of a decade ago, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics reported.
“Removing the VAT exemption is largely symbolic and unlikely to have much impact on the bigger picture,” said He Yafu, a demographer with the YuWa Population Research Institute in Beijing, according to reports.
“It reflects an effort to shape a social environment that encourages childbirth and reduces abortions.”
But making condoms more expensive could have unintended consequences.
The medical community is concerned the incoming policies will facilitate the spread of HIV, which has been on the rise in China despite decreasing across the globe, according to the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which found HIV and AIDS cases spiking from 0.37 per 100,000 people to 8.41 between 2002 and 2021.
The new measures have also sparked a fierce social media debate.
“If someone can’t afford a condom, how could they afford raising a child?” one skeptic wrote on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo.
