In 2018 there were over 40 thousand deaths caused by ischaemic heart diseases in the United Kingdom, making it the leading cause of death in that year. Since 2001 there has been a noticeable increase in the number of people dying from dementia or alzheimers, which caused 26.5 thousand deaths in 2018, an increase of almost ten thousand when compared with 2012.

Registered leading causes of death by age, sex and country, UK, 2001 to 2018

Mortality from leading causes of death by ethnic group, England and Wales, 2012 to 2019.

The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) has updated the Mortality Profile.

The profile brings together a selection of mortality indicators, including from other OHID data tools such as the https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile/public-health-outcomes-framework/data" class="govuk-link">Public Health Outcomes Framework, making it easier to assess outcomes across a range of causes of death.

For the January 2022 update, 2 new indicators have been added to the profile:

• mortality rate for deaths involving COVID-19, all ages
• mortality rate for deaths involving COVID-19, under 75s

COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in England in 2020, but the pandemic had a much greater impact on mortality in some areas than others. These indicators have been included alongside other indicators for leading causes of death in the Mortality Profile to provide a more complete picture of mortality for local areas in 2020.

If you would like to send us feedback on the tool please contact profilefeedback@phe.gov.uk.

Leading causes of death by age group and sex Source agency: Office for National Statistics Designation: Official Statistics not designated as National Statistics Language: English Alternative title: Mortality

There were 10,014 deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending September 26, 2025, compared with 9,759 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 into decline since 2020. Between 2020 and 2022, for example, life expectancy at birth fell by 23 weeks for females, and 37 weeks for males. 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.

In 1948, over a quarter of deaths recorded in England and Wales were caused by heart disease. The National Health Service was founded in this year in the UK and aimed at improving the health of British citizens.

Annual age-standardised and age-specific mortality rates by leading causes of death for England and Wales, 2001 to 2018 (Experimental Statistics)

This statistic depicts the number of deaths in Great Britain, which only includes England and Wales, sorted by main causes of death in 2011. In that year, 5,937 people in England and Wales died from infections.

Leading causes of death by age group and sex

Source agency: Office for National Statistics

Designation: Official Statistics not designated as National Statistics

Language: English

Alternative title: Mortality

Provisional data on death registrations and death occurrences in England and Wales, broken down by sex and age. Includes deaths due to coronavirus (COVID-19) and leading causes of death.

A dataset providing GP recorded coronary heart disease. Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death both in the UK and worldwide. It's responsible for more than 73,000 deaths in the UK each year. About 1 in 6 men and 1 in 10 women die from CHD. In the UK, there are an estimated 2.3 million people living with CHD and around 2 million people affected by angina (the most common symptom of coronary heart disease). CHD generally affects more men than women, although from the age of 50 the chances of developing the condition are similar for both sexes. As well as angina (chest pain), the main symptoms of CHD are heart attacks and heart failure. However, not everyone has the same symptoms and some people may not have any before CHD is diagnosed. CHD is sometimes called ischaemic heart disease.

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 around 689,600 deaths in the United Kingdom, the highest in more than a century. Although there were fewer deaths in 2021, at almost 667,500, 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 even declined since 2017/19. As of 2023, the country with the highest life expectancy in the World was Switzerland at 84.2 years, followed by Japan at 84.1 years, and then by Spain at 84 years.

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.

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner. This study comprises a complete transcription of all the district-level tables which are the main contents of each of the Registrar-General for England and Wales Decennial Supplements from 1851-60 to 1901-10; these are supplements to the 25th, 35th, 45th, 55th, 65th and 75th Annual Reports. The reports for 1851-1900 were computerised by a project led by Professor Robert Woods of Liverpool University, creating a large set of spreadsheets, one for each district in each decade. These were assembled into a single large file by the Great Britain Historical GIS, working in collaboration with Hamish James of the UK Data Archive. The GBHGIS team computerised the 1901-10 report, checked all data against the original reports, and added identifiers linking the districts to the digital boundary data they had created. For each district in each decade, the reports cross-tabulate causes of death against age. In some decades, there are separate tables for each district for males and females, and the causes of death vary between decades. There were c. 630 districts, the exact number varying by decade. Main Topics: Decennial cause of death data for Registration Districts in England and Wales cross-classified by age and sometimes by sex. The study also includes a separate table, mainly derived, containing age- and gender-specific counts of deaths, without cause information and organised to simplify calculation of standardised mortality rates.

This publication of the SHMI relates to discharges in the reporting period February 2022 - January 2023. 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. Deaths related to COVID-19 are excluded from the SHMI. 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). Information about the exclusion of COVID-19 from the SHMI can also be found on the same page. A link to the methodological changes statement which details the exclusion is also available in the Related Links section

In July 2025, there were 45,791 deaths in England and Wales, compared with 44,401 in June. In April 2020, there were 88,038 deaths, which was an increase of almost 40,000 from the month before and by far the month with the most deaths in this period. The dramatic increase in deaths in April can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which first hit the UK in early 2020.