Between 1953 and 2021, the death rate of the United Kingdom fluctuated between a high of 12.2 deaths per 1,000 people in 1962 and a low of 8.7 in 2011. From 2011 onwards, the death rate creeped up slightly and, in 2020, reached 10.3 deaths per 1,000 people. In 2021, the most recent year provided here, the death rate was ten, a decline from 2020 but still higher than in almost every year in the twenty-first century. The recent spike in the death rate corresponds to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, with the first cases recorded in early 2020. Most deaths since 1918 in 2020 In 2020, there were 689,629 deaths in the United Kingdom, the highest in more than a century. Although there were fewer deaths in 2021, at 667,479, this was still far higher than in recent years. When looking at the weekly deaths in England and Wales for this time period, two periods stand out for reporting far more deaths than usual. The first period was between weeks 13 and 22 of 2020, which saw two weeks in late April report more than 20,000 deaths. Excess deaths for the week ending April 17, 2020, were 11,854, and 11,539 for the following week. Another wave of deaths occurred in January 2021, when there were more than 18,000 deaths per week between weeks three and five of that year. Improvements to life expectancy slowing Between 2020 and 2022, life expectancy in the United Kingdom was approximately 82.57 years for women and 78.57 years for men. Compared with life expectancy in 1980/82 this marked an increase of around six years for women and almost eight years for men. Despite these long-term developments, improvements to life expectancy have been slowing in recent years, and have declined since 2017/19. As of 2022, the country with the highest life expectancy in the World was Japan, which was 84.5 years, followed by South Korea, at 83.6 years.

Annual data on death registrations by area of usual residence in the UK. Summary tables including age-standardised mortality rates.

Live births by usual residence of mother, and General Fertility Rates (GFR), and Deaths and Standardised Mortality Ratio (SMR) by ward and local authority.

The births and deaths data comes from ONS Vital Statistics Table 4.
Small area data is only available directly from ONS under licence.

The general fertility rate (GFR) is the number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15-44.

SMR measures whether the population of an area has a higher or lower number of deaths than expected based on the age profile of the population (more deaths are expected in older populations). The SMR is defined as follows: SMR = (Observed no. of deaths per year)/(Expected no. of deaths per year).

Rates are provisional, they are based on the GLA 2011 based SHLAA ward projections (standard) released in January 2012. At national level, however, they are based on the mid-year population estimates.

More information is on the ONS website.

In 2023, the age-specific death rate for men aged 90 or over in England and Wales was 248.1 per one thousand population, and 215.1 for women. Except for infants that were under the age of one, younger age groups had the lowest death rate, with the death rate getting progressively higher in older age groups.

Provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, by age, sex, region and Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), in the latest weeks for which data are available.

Graph and download economic data for Premature Death Rate for New London County, CT (CDC20N2U009011) from 1999 to 2020 about New London County, CT; Norwich; CT; premature; death; rate; and USA.

There were 11,607 deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending February 21, 2025, compared with 12,365 in the previous week. During this time period, the two weeks with the highest number of weekly deaths were in April 2020, with the week ending April 17, 2020, having 22,351 deaths, and the following week 21,997 deaths, a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Death and life expectancy As of 2022, the life expectancy for women in the UK was just over 82.5 years, and almost 78.6 years for men. Compared with 1765, when average life expectancy was under 39 years, this is a huge improvement in historical terms. Even in the more recent past, life expectancy was less than 47 years at the start of the 20th Century, and was under 70 as recently as the 1950s. Despite these significant developments in the long-term, improvements in life expectancy stalled between 2009/11 and 2015/17, and have even gone in decline since 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, for example, life expectancy at birth fell by 23 weeks for females, and 37 weeks for males.2. COVID-19 in the UK The first cases of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom were recorded on January 31, 2020, but it was not until a month later that cases began to rise exponentially. By March 5 of this year there were more than 100 cases, rising to 1,000 days later and passing 10,000 cumulative cases by March 26. At the height of the pandemic in late April and early May, there were around six thousand new cases being recorded daily. As of January 2023, there were more than 24.2 million confirmed cumulative cases of COVID-19 recorded in the United Kingdom, resulting in 202,156 deaths.

From the 1630s to the 1830s, the annual number of smallpox deaths in each decade fluctuated greatly in London. The population of London in 1650 is estimated to have stood at 350,000 inhabitants, with an average annual death toll of roughly 680 people during this time. As London's population grew over the next hundred years, the number of smallpox deaths also increased at varying rates in each decade. Scientific advancements flatten the curve The average number of annual smallpox deaths was between 1.7 and 2.5 thousand in each decade between 1710 and 1799, as the introduction of inoculation (i.e. using a mild dose of smallpox to develop some immunity to the virus) helped to lower the smallpox death rate to some extent. Following Jenner's discovery of vaccination in 1796 (which provided a much safer and more reliable method of protection), the death rate decreases further. London's population at this time was just under one million people, and the average number of deaths in the first decade of the 1800s was 1.4 thousand per year (or 1.4 deaths per thousand inhabitants). Vaccination brought this number down even further in the next quarter century, despite the fact that mandatory vaccination was not implemented by the British government until 1853. Smallpox death rate in other capitals While there is little reliable data for other major cities in the seventeenth or early-eighteenth century, London's death rate can be compared with that of Berlin or Copenhagen at the turn of the nineteenth century, during a time of increased urbanization and industrialization. In 1800, Berlin was estimated to have a population of roughly 170,000 people, and Copenhagen's was 100,000. This gave Berlin a smallpox of death rate of roughly 2.7 deaths per thousand in the first decade of the 1800s, and Copenhagen's was 0.67 deaths per thousand. Berlin's smallpox death rate was consistent between 1770 and 1809, while Copenhagen and London's both decrease after vaccination was introduced (Denmark made it mandatory in 1810). Unfortunately, a lack of information from this time makes it difficult to draw further conclusions about the spread of smallpox in urban centers in these years.

Annual UK and constituent country figures for births, deaths, marriages, divorces, civil partnerships and civil partnership dissolutions.

Annual data on death registrations by single year of age for the UK (1974 onwards) and England and Wales (1963 onwards).

Number of deaths registered each month by area of usual residence for England and Wales, by region, county, health authorities, local and unitary authority, and London borough.

This publication of the SHMI relates to discharges in the reporting period October 2023 - September 2024. The SHMI is the ratio between the actual number of patients who die following hospitalisation at the trust and the number that would be expected to die on the basis of average England figures, given the characteristics of the patients treated there. The SHMI covers patients admitted to hospitals in England who died either while in hospital or within 30 days of being discharged. To help users of the data understand the SHMI, trusts have been categorised into bandings indicating whether a trust's SHMI is 'higher than expected', 'as expected' or 'lower than expected'. For any given number of expected deaths, a range of observed deaths is considered to be 'as expected'. If the observed number of deaths falls outside of this range, the trust in question is considered to have a higher or lower SHMI than expected. The expected number of deaths is a statistical construct and is not a count of patients. The difference between the number of observed deaths and the number of expected deaths cannot be interpreted as the number of avoidable deaths or excess deaths for the trust. The SHMI is not a measure of quality of care. A higher than expected number of deaths should not immediately be interpreted as indicating poor performance and instead should be viewed as a 'smoke alarm' which requires further investigation. Similarly, an 'as expected' or 'lower than expected' SHMI should not immediately be interpreted as indicating satisfactory or good performance. Trusts may be located at multiple sites and may be responsible for 1 or more hospitals. A breakdown of the data by site of treatment is also provided, as well as a breakdown of the data by diagnosis group. Further background information and supporting documents, including information on how to interpret the SHMI, are available on the SHMI homepage (see Related Links).

In 2021, the infant mortality rate in the United Kingdom was four deaths one year per 1,000 live births, one of the lowest infant mortality rate in this period. Infant mortality has fallen considerably since 1900, when there were 150 infant deaths per 1,000 live births.

Table of directly (DSR) age-standardised rates of suicides per 100,000 population, and Indirectly (SMR) (Includes undetermined Injuries), all ages and age 15 plus, three year (pooled) average and annual, by sex.

Deaths from intentional self-harm and injury undetermined whether accidentally or purposely inflicted (ICD-10 X60-X84, Y10-Y34 exc Y33.9, ICD-9 E950-E959 and E980-E989 exc E988.8), registered in the respective calendar year(s).

DSR stands for Directly age-Standardised Rates.

Mortality rates are age standardised using the European Standard Population as defined by the World Health Organisation.

3 year average rates are calculated as the average of single year rates for 3 successive years.

Standardised Mortality Ratio (SMR), England = 100

NHS mental health information can be found here.

Various other suicide indicators are available from IC NHS website, including years of life lost, crude death rates, and indirectly standardised ratios (SMR). Follow: Compendium of population health indicators > Illness and Condition > Mental health and behavioural disorders

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The Great Britain Historical Database has been assembled as part of the ongoing Great Britain Historical GIS Project. The project aims to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain at sub-county scales. Further information about the project is available on A Vision of Britain webpages, where users can browse the database's documentation system online.

These data were originally published in the reports of the Registrar-General for England and Wales. They were computerised by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project and its collaborators. They form part of the Great Britain Historical Database, which contains a wide range of geographically-located statistics, selected to trace the emergence of the north-south divide in Britain and to provide a synoptic view of the human geography of Britain, generally at sub-county scales.

This study mainly comprises data from the RG's Annual Reports, with some data from the Quarterly Returns. A very extensive transcription from the Decennial Supplements forms a separate study.

Latest edition information

For the second edition (December 2022) the previous data and documentation files were replaced with new versions, and access conditions were changed from safeguarded to open access.

Annual counts of births and deaths for all Registration Districts in all years 1850 to 1910, with marriages for some years.

Annual cause-of-death data for all Registration Districts in all years, 1856 to 1910. The causes of death focus on epidemic diseases.

Annual age-specific mortality data for all Registration Districts for 1840-42, 1850-52, 1860-1882, 1890-92, 1900-02, 1908-1910 (i.e. for most of the period, census years plus immediately adjacent years).

Quarterly counts of births, deaths and selected causes of death from the Registrar-General's Quarterly Returns, for Registration sub-Districts. This is limited to (1) a full transcription of all four quarters for each census year within the period covered by the Quarterly Returns: 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911; (2) numbers of births and infant deaths in all sub-districts in the County of London from the full run of reports from 1871 to 1911; and (3) a full transcription of all four quarters of 1876, but limited to the north-west of England, defined as Cheshire, Lancashire and Westmorland plus Chapel-en-le-Frith and Hayfield Registration Districts in Derbyshire and Saddleworth in the West Riding.

Individual cholera deaths in London in summer and autumn 1866 arranged by date and causes of death, plus a variant which is adjusted for deaths in hospitals (these data were created by Graham Mooney).

A separate UKDS study contains decennial age-specific cause of death data for all Registration Districts in all decades from 1851-60 to 1901-10.

Please note: this study does not include information on named individuals and would therefore not be useful for personal family history research.

Age-standardised mortality rates for deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19), non-COVID-19 deaths and all deaths by vaccination status, broken down by age group.

This dataset contains weekly mortality statistics, broken down by cause of death, for London, from 1870-1939. These data were entered from the Weekly Reports produced by the Registrar General's Office. The data set also includes age breakdowns, when available, as well as the number of births in each week.

Deaths by local authority of usual residence, numbers and standardised mortality ratios (SMRs) by sex.

SMR measures whether the population of an area has a higher or lower number of deaths than expected based on the age profile of the population (more deaths are expected in older populations). The SMR is defined as follows: SMR = (Observed no. of deaths per year)/(Expected no. of deaths per year).

SMRs are calculated using the previous year's mid-year population estimates. Live birth figures are used for calculations involving deaths under 1 year.

The age-standardised mortality rates in this release are directly age-standardised to the European Standard Population, which cover all ages and allows comparisons between populations with different age structures, including between males and females and over time.

Note: SMR and deaths by sex data only available since 2001.

Download from ONS website