2024 U.S. Top Causes of Death by Age Group, Finalized Data

Plus an update to the main mortality post

Feb 19, 2026

CDC WONDER was updated with the finalized 2024 U.S. death data yesterday, so I have a bunch of updates to do.

One of the first was to update my organized mortality compilation post here: Mortality Posts and Resources: 2026 Update

If you’re looking for a specific topic, that may be more helpful than using search on substack, as I often write about the same topics multiple times, and substack search is extremely basic.

Counts haven’t changed much from my preliminary ranking table, which is generally what happens. At a high level, there aren’t very many new deaths that come in, and there aren’t many re-categorizations of deaths.

If you’re idly curious, COVID-19 dropped to the 15th place for Underlying Cause of Death in 2024, going down to 31,426 deaths compared to the 50K in 2023.

The causes ranking #11 - #14, ranking above COVID in 2024:

Flu/pneumonia (48K deaths)
Kidney disease (42K)
Parkinson’s disease (41K)
Septicemia (40K)

We’ll see these in the ranking tables broken out by age group.

Ranking Causes of Death 2018-2024, Age-Adjusted Death Rates

I have to state that this “ranking table” is using the ordering from the number of deaths, because if you look at a cause like suicide, its age-adjusted death rate is higher than causes above it on the list. This relates to the age distribution of deaths for each of these causes, not only the overall rate.

An explanation of age-adjusted death rates is here:

Mortality Basics with Meep: Age-Adjusted Death Rates v. Crude Death Rates for U.S. 1968-2020

The reason to use age-adjusted rates is to be able to compare a trend for a cause of death year-over-year.

For instance, the number of cancer deaths is higher than ever, but the age-adjusted rate continues to decrease.

Ranking Tables for 2024 Causes of Death by Age, U.S., Count

Yes, these are big. There is a lot of information here!

I like to present both count and rate, because one can see that something may be ranked lower for a particular age group, and then see the number of deaths for the older age group is so much higher. It tends to be like that.

Two items can be ranked next to each other, and be very close in count… or very far apart. One sees this with cancer and heart disease deaths for the middle-aged shading into the elderly, as the two causes start out close in number, widen, and then get closer once again as heart disease surpasses.

Ranking Tables for 2024 Causes of Death by Age, U.S., Rate

Rather than use the standard rate per 100,000 used among those of us who throw around mortality rates on the daily, I use percentages. I want to use forms of numbers most people are used to… and it gives people a better idea of the magnitudes.

If you compare the rates I have here against the preliminary rates, you’ll see some differences, because population estimates differed quite a bit for the older age groups. With larger population estimates at the older ages, we end up with lower death rates.