Pandas usually only have one baby at a time. Adult pandas are big, but a baby panda is only as big as a stick of butter when it is born. The mother panda has to take very good care of these tiny babies.

Sometimes a panda will have twins. The Atlanta Zoo was very happy in 2016 when twin pandas were born.

A mother panda can live for 20 years in the wild. She will only have 4 or 5 babies in her lifetime.

In zoos, pandas can live longer and have more babies. Why do you think pandas in zoos life longer and have more babies?

Pandas, much like any mammal, can give birth to as many babies as they physically can. As long as the panda is healthy, the limit is only how long the panda stays alive. After a panda gets successfully pregnant, it takes around 135 days (4.5 months) for the baby panda to be born. This is relatively short if you compare it to a human (270 days, 9 months) or an elephant (660 days, 22 months!). So, if a panda that is capable of having a baby, and has a baby every 4.5 months, though unlikely, it can have lots and lots of baby pandas.

Typically, either one or two cubs are born to one mother panda at a time.

Since pandas carry their babies for anywhere between 95 and 160 days before giving birth, and female pandas can give birth from as young as age four to as old as age twenty, a mother panda can theoretically birth to about 120 baby pandas in her lifetime, at the most (365 days per year * 16 years / 95 days per pregnancy * 2 babies per pregnancy). However, this number is extremely unlikely because a mother panda will most likely not get pregnant again immediately after giving birth, and mother pandas only give birth to two cubs about half of time they become pregnant. Therefore, it is probably more likely that a mother panda would give birth to very few babies in her lifetime.

One or 2 at a time.

Sad news:
Baby pandas weigh only 90 to 130 grams (3.5 to 4 oz.) at birth - about 1/900th of its mother's weight. Litters of one or two cubs are born. If two cubs are born, the mother usually abandons the weaker cub, and it dies soon after birth.

Pandas usually have only one cub per pregnancy, much like humans. Humans do have twins on occasion, or triplets or more than triplets, and I can only imagine that the same is true of pandas.

Pandas are a bit unique amongst other members of the Ursidae family (the grouping of animals including most bears) because they generally give birth to one cub at a time. Most of the other members of this family generally give birth to an average of 2-3 cubs per litter.

Pandas are capable of giving birth approximately every two years, but it can be much less often than that since finding another panda to mate with in the wild can be difficult. This is one of the reasons that it is really important to protect the habitat of pandas. They give birth so infrequently that we should work to try to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Thank you for your question!