U.S. Finalized Mortality 2024: Highlights
GREAT NEWS! Death is down! Life expectancy exceeding pre-pandemic levels
29 Jan 2026, CDC, National Center for Health Statistics: Mortality in the United States, 2024
Here is the PDF of same: Data Brief, Mortality in the United States, 2024
The people who work at the CDC get first stab at the mortality statistics (only fair, they clean up the data that comes in, put up with annoying questions from people like me, yadda yadda), so I don’t see the data available at WONDER yet for the kind of breakdowns I prefer.
So I will take some highlights, explaining some of the concepts to provide context.
As the comparisons being made tend to be against only 2023, as I have prior years’ data, I will use the new data points in my old, longer-term data sets to show the long-term trend.
Period Life Expectancy Continues To Increase, Recovering from Pandemic Disruption
Here we go with their graph:
I do have prior years’ data, so let me give you a longer-period graphical representation:
U.S. Period Life Expectancy by Sex, 2015-2024
It may not be obvious peering at the graphs, so let me give you little tables, as I did with the last such update:
Life expectancy now exceeds the pre-pandemic level in 2019, for both sexes, which was not the case in 2023.
Last year’s post:
Yay!
To be sure, period life expectancy is a high-level metric that collapses a large amount of information into one number. There are some bad mortality trends (as I have some posts brewing in the background), but the high-level story is that the big impacts of the pandemic are gone.
Smaller impacts may remain… and there may be long-term morbidity (that is, illness, rather than death).
Longer-Term Life Expectancy Trend: 1900-2024
It can help to see the mortality impact of the recent pandemic, at a high level, by looking at longer-term life expectancy graphs.
The older mortality tables come courtesy historical information from the Social Security Administration. Downloadable spreadsheet, with links to the sources, is below.
Male
That is quite the dip in life expectancy in 1918 (the Spanish flu pandemic…. note the effect is from birth, not at age 65.)
Female
There are different gaps between the life expectancy from birth for males and females, which relates to the probability of dying before age 65 (and exactly the distribution of ages at which one dies so young.)
But again, you need to remember these are period life expectancies and not cohort life expectancies — that is, this has nothing to do with what you, as an individual, living in the year 2026, has as your personal life expectancy.
The period life expectancy from birth and age 65 as reported above is just one mortality metric so that one can compare one year against another as to general mortality levels.
Information on period vs. cohort life expectancy
From my prior post:
Period life expectancy is the life expectancy you hear reported each year in the press, that gets released by the CDC in these reports, etc.
It is taking the mortality experience for the whole population during a specific time period, usually a single year (in this case, 2021), and then calculating life expectancy as if the mortality seen by the full population during that year was the one a person would be seeing during a lifetime. No person actually lives through a mortality pattern like this, because we’re not in a “steady state” for mortality.
Period life expectancy is the flip-side of age-adjusted mortality rates.
Cohort life expectancy is the life expectancy based on one’s birth year, which is the relevant life expectancy for things such as retirement planning. As an actuary, I’m looking at this measure for pensions and annuities. Well, no, I’m not.
In the next few sections, the CDC report uses the age-adjusted death rate, which is my preferred mortality metric for comparisons. Or perhaps just the plain death rate for an age group.
I can explain why you don’t use cohort life expectancy for retirement planning here:
Spreadsheet
Excellent News: Decrease In Death Rates Across the Board… Especially the Young
There is excellent news across the board for the 2024 data, in that not only did mortality drop … it’s the why and who.
There are classification issues re: race/ethnicity, evidently, so I’m not dealing with that right now. I have to look into that later.
Less controversial is age, and here is their graph:
Death rates are quoted in rates per 100,000 people, so the death rate for those age 75-84 years old, for instance, is about 4.3% per year.
Let me show you this as a table - as percentage change in rate from 2023 to 2024:
Young adults and teens have seen their death rates drop, thank goodness — those had increased due to the “nasties”: suicide, homicide, drug ODs… and even motor vehicle accidents.
Speaking of which…
Causes of Death
I want to highlight “unintentional injuries”, aka “Accidents”.
A lot of nasty stuff gets hidden in that cause of death. Drug overdoses. Motor vehicle accidents. Falls (seniors, mostly). Drowning. Lightning strikes (not many people die that way, but still.)
The main huge increase in cause of death in that category during the pandemic was drug ODs, most often from fentanyl. There was a decrease in that cause in 2024, and it continued to decrease into 2025. A lot.
Of all the causes of death above, including suicide, they decreased in age-adjusted rate by about 2-4% compared to 2023.
Except for “accidents” — those decreased in rate by 14%.
This is fabulous news.
Once the finalized data set is released, I will be digging into these nasties, but also the top causes of death in general.
We’ll see how these compare. I expect the rates to differ a little, but sometimes even the counts shift a bit due to recalcitrant states needing to have their data cleaned up a lot.
