2025 U.S. Top Causes of Death by Age Group, Preliminary
Let's just focus on the count for now -- look at a few big movements
As with previous years, I have to wait until July for the external causes of death to become uncensored through the end of the prior year. To keep things simple for this post, I want to focus solely on death counts, not rates.
Ranking Causes of Death 2018-2025, Count
The 2025 counts are preliminary; thus, the “E” for “estimated” on 2025E.
There are two items to point out in this ranking table, one obvious and one not.
The obvious item: the appearance of flu/pneumonia in 2025 after several years it was absent… while COVID was taking its place, essentially. COVID dropped to 15th place in 2024 and then to 19th place in 2025.
Remember how seasonal flu was bad for the 2024-2025 season? Yeah, this is it. Look back to the pre-pandemic years, and you will see these counts are about the same levels.
But the big story is the drop in count of “Accidents”: from 197,499 in 2024 to 185,465 in 2025. That’s a 6% decrease. I will be digging into the components of that… in another post.
But we can look at the age groups contributing to that below.
Ranking Tables for 2025 Causes of Death by Age, U.S., Count
It is going to require the similar table from 2024 in order to look at changes.
Though it didn’t show up in the top 10 causes of death — mainly because the top 10 tends to be ones that kill the oldest people — note the numbers on HOMICIDES.
I will make it simple, rather than do it age group by age group for homicides:
The change from 2024 to 2025 is a decrease of about 14%. Homicide is ranked 17th overall for cause of death.
But the really large decrease from 2024 to 2025 is in “Accidents” — which encompasses many disparate kinds of deaths. A reminder:
So let us look where the biggest changes in accidental deaths came from:
Age 25-34: 17% decrease in count, almost 4000 fewer deaths
Age 15-24: 13% decrease, about 1500 fewer deaths
Age 35-44: 12% decrease, about 3400 fewer deaths
ACCIDENTS ARE THE TOP CAUSE OF DEATH FOR THESE AGES.
I hope you see what I’m getting at.
As I mentioned above, I will be getting into the specific accidental causes of death that dropped….
(It’s mainly drug overdoses, let’s be clear…. I’m saying this without even needing to do a detailed look right now).
Aggregate: A Win… Disaggregate… Mixed
So let’s take the W on what we can, but keep in mind that doesn’t mean all causes of death have trended well in 2025.
As we have already seen, flu/pneumonia was bad in 2025 (which we already knew in the season).
Right now, the ranking table helps us a little in seeing some disaggregation after the good news of aggregate good mortality trends:
Preliminary 2025 U.S. Mortality: Death Rates Down Again!
These are preliminary data from the CDC, but this accords with what I had been expecting… and I should be able to do a good preliminary ranking table by cause of death next week, by age group and by sex.
But it will require actually looking at rates…. another time.
