In 2022 life expectancy for both males and females at birth fell when compared to 2021. Male life expectancy fell from 78.71 years to 78.57 years, and from 82.68 years to 82.57 years for women.

Life expectancy in the United Kingdom was below 39 years in the year 1765, and over the course of the next two and a half centuries, it is expected to have increased by more than double, to 81.1 by the year 2020. Although life expectancy has generally increased throughout the UK's history, there were several times where the rate deviated from its previous trajectory. These changes were the result of smallpox epidemics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new sanitary and medical advancements throughout time (such as compulsory vaccination), and the First world War and Spanish Flu epidemic in the 1910s.

In 2022, the life expectancy at birth for women born in the UK was 82.57 years, compared with 78.57 years for men. By age 65 men had a life expectancy of 18.25 years, compared with 20.76 years for women.

In 2023, the average life expectancy of the world was 70 years for men and 75 years for women. The lowest life expectancies were found in Africa, while Oceania and Europe had the highest.

What is life expectancy?

Life expectancy is defined as a statistical measure of how long a person may live, based on demographic factors such as gender, current age, and most importantly the year of their birth. The most commonly used measure of life expectancy is life expectancy at birth or at age zero. The calculation is based on the assumption that mortality rates at each age were to remain constant in the future.

Life expectancy has changed drastically over time, especially during the past 200 years. In the early 20th century, the average life expectancy at birth in the developed world stood at 31 years. It has grown to an average of 70 and 75 years for males and females respectively, and is expected to keep on growing with advances in medical treatment and living standard continuing.

Highest and lowest life expectancy worldwide

Life expectancy still varies greatly between different regions and countries of the world. The biggest impact on life expectancy is the quality of public health, medical care, and diet. As of 2021, the countries with the highest life expectancy were Japan, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and South Korea, all at 84 years. Most of the countries with the lowest life expectancy are mostly African countries. The ranking was led by the Chad, Nigeria, and Lesotho with 53 years.

There were 12,005 deaths registered in England and Wales for the week ending March 7, 2025, compared with 11,907 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.

Update 2 March 2023: Following the merger of NHS Digital and NHS England on 1st February 2023 we are reviewing the future presentation of the NHS Outcomes Framework indicators. As part of this review, the annual publication which was due to be released in March 2023 has been delayed. Further announcements about this dataset will be made on this page in due course. The average number of additional years a man or woman aged 75 can be expected to live if they continue to live in the same place and the death rates in their area remain the same for the rest of their life. To ensure that the NHS is held to account for doing all that it can to prevent avoidable deaths in older people. This indicator captures all persons aged 75 and over. A correction was made to this indicator on the 6th March 2019 due to errors found in the data. The confidence intervals for females in the region breakdown for the 2015-17 time period were displayed the wrong way round and some of the upper intervals were rounded incorrectly. These have now been corrected. A further correction was made to this indicator on the 21st May 2020. For 2015-17, The population numbers presented within the local authority (LA) breakdown for females were found to be incorrect for three LAs. The affected LAs were Redcar and Cleveland (E06000003), Norwich (E07000148) and Redbridge (E09000026). These have now been corrected. The indicator value and confidence intervals for all three LAs were unaffected by the error. Legacy unique identifier: P01728

Between 1980 and 2022, life expectancy at 65 has increased for males and females in the United Kingdom. For men life expectancy has grown by around 5.29 years, while for women it has increased by about 3.85 years.

The average number of additional years a man or woman aged 75 can be expected to live if they continue to live in the same place and the death rates in their area remain the same for the rest of their life. To ensure that the NHS is held to account for doing all that it can to prevent avoidable deaths in older people. This indicator captures all persons aged 75 and over. A correction was made to this indicator on the 6th March 2019 due to errors found in the data. The confidence intervals for females in the region breakdown for the 2015-17 time period were displayed the wrong way round and some of the upper intervals were rounded incorrectly. These have now been corrected. A further correction was made to this indicator on the 21st May 2020. For 2015-17, The population numbers presented within the local authority (LA) breakdown for females were found to be incorrect for three LAs. The affected LAs were Redcar and Cleveland (E06000003), Norwich (E07000148) and Redbridge (E09000026). These have now been corrected. The indicator value and confidence intervals for all three LAs were unaffected by the error. Legacy unique identifier: P01728

Male healthy life expectancy was 60.9 years. Female healthy life expectancy was 61.8 years. For males, healthy life expectancy at birth was highest in Orkney Islands (71.2 years) and lowest in Inverclyde (54.4 years). For females, healthy life expectancy at birth was highest in Orkney (77.5 years) and lowest in North Ayrshire (54.0 years).

Between 2021 and 2023, London was the region of the United Kingdom that had the highest average life expectancy for females, at 84.13 years, while South East England had the highest life expectancy for males at 80.32 years. By comparison, Scotland had the lowest life expectancy, at 76.79 for males and 80.77 for females.

Between 2021 and 2023, life expectancy for women in the United Kingdom was highest in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, at 86.46 years, while for men it was highest in Hart, at 83.44.

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

Life expectancy at birth and at age 65, by sex, on a three-year average basis.

As of 2023, the countries with the highest life expectancy included Switzerland, Japan, and Spain. As of that time, a new-born child in Switzerland could expect to live an average of 84.2 years. Around the world, females consistently have a higher average life expectancy than males, with females in Europe expected to live an average of six years longer than males on this continent. Increases in life expectancy The overall average life expectancy in OECD countries increased by 11.3 years from 1970 to 2019. The countries that saw the largest increases included Turkey, India, and South Korea. The life expectancy at birth in Turkey increased an astonishing 24.4 years over this period. The countries with the lowest life expectancy worldwide as of 2022 were Chad, Lesotho, and Nigeria, where a newborn could be expected to live an average of 53 years. Life expectancy in the U.S. The life expectancy in the United States was 77.43 years as of 2022. Shockingly, the life expectancy in the United States has decreased in recent years, while it continues to increase in other similarly developed countries. The COVID-19 pandemic and increasing rates of suicide and drug overdose deaths from the opioid epidemic have been cited as reasons for this decrease.

A global phenomenon, known as the demographic transition, has seen life expectancy from birth increase rapidly over the past two centuries. In pre-industrial societies, the average life expectancy was around 24 years, and it is believed that this was the case throughout most of history, and in all regions. The demographic transition then began in the industrial societies of Europe, North America, and the West Pacific around the turn of the 19th century, and life expectancy rose accordingly. Latin America was the next region to follow, before Africa and most Asian populations saw their life expectancy rise throughout the 20th century.

In 2020/22, life expectancy at birth fell by almost 23 weeks for women and by over 37 weeks for men. During this provided time period the biggest improvements in life expectancy occurred in 2009/11, increasing by almost 54 weeks for men and just over 42 weeks for women.

At the beginning of the 1840s, life expectancy from birth in Ireland was just over 38 years. However, this figure would see a dramatic decline with the beginning of the Great Famine in 1845, and dropped below 21 years in the second half of the decade (in 1849 alone, life expectancy fell to just 14 years). The famine came as a result of a Europe-wide potato blight, which had a disproportionally devastating impact on the Irish population due to the dependency on potatoes (particularly in the south and east), and the prevalence of a single variety of potato on the island that allowed the blight to spread faster than in other areas of Europe. Additionally, authorities forcefully redirected much of the country's surplus grain to the British mainland, which exacerbated the situation. Within five years, mass starvation would contribute to the deaths of over one million people on the island, while a further one million would emigrate; this also created a legacy of emigration from Ireland, which saw the population continue to fall until the mid-1900s, and the total population of the island is still well below its pre-famine level of 8.5 million people.

Following the end of the Great Famine, life expectancy would begin to gradually increase in Ireland, as post-famine reforms would see improvements in the living standards of the country’s peasantry, most notably the Land Wars, a largely successful series of strikes, boycotts and protests aimed at reform of the country's agricultural land distribution, which began in the 1870s and lasted into the 20th century. As these reforms were implemented, life expectancy in Ireland would rise to more than fifty years by the turn of the century. While this rise would slow somewhat in the 1910s, due to the large number of Irish soldiers who fought in the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, as well as the period of civil unrest leading up to the island's partition in 1921, life expectancy in Ireland would rise greatly in the 20th century. In the second half of the 20th century, Ireland's healthcare system and living standards developed similarly to the rest of Western Europe, and today, it is often ranks among the top countries globally in terms of human development, GDP and quality of healthcare. With these developments, the increase in life expectancy from birth in Ireland was relatively constant in the first century of independence, and in 2020 is estimated to be 82 years.

For the period 2020 to 2022, life expectancy in Greater Manchester was 80.9 years for women, and 76.7 years for men. Although this was an increase of approximately 2.6 years for men and 1.8 years for women when compared to 2001/03, life expectancy for both men and women has fallen when compared to 2017/19.

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.

For the week ending March 7, 2025, weekly deaths in England and Wales were 124 below the number expected, compared with 460 fewer than expected in the previous week. In late 2022, and through early 2023, excess deaths were elevated for a number of weeks, with the excess deaths figure for the week ending January 13, 2023, the highest since February 2021. In the middle of April 2020, at the height of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there were almost 12,000 excess deaths a week recorded in England and Wales. It was not until two months later, in the week ending June 19, 2020, that the number of deaths began to be lower than the five-year average for the corresponding week. Most deaths since 1918 in 2020 In 2020, there were 689,629 deaths in the United Kingdom, making that year the deadliest since 1918, at the height of the Spanish influenza pandemic. As seen in the excess death figures, April 2020 was by far the worst month in terms of deaths during the pandemic. The weekly number of deaths for weeks 16 and 17 of that year were 22,351, and 21,997 respectively. Although the number of deaths fell to more usual levels for the rest of that year, a winter wave of the disease led to a high number of deaths in January 2021, with 18,676 deaths recorded in the fourth week of that year. For the whole of 2021, there were 667,479 deaths in the UK, 22,150 fewer than in 2020. Life expectancy in the UK goes into reverse In 2022, life expectancy at birth for women in the UK was 82.6 years, while for men it was 78.6 years. This was the lowest life expectancy in the country for ten years, and came after life expectancy improvements stalled throughout the 2010s, and then declined from 2020 onwards. There is also quite a significant regional difference in life expectancy in the UK. In the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for example, the life expectancy for men was 81.5 years, and 86.5 years for women. By contrast, in Blackpool, in North West England, male life expectancy was just 73.1 years, while for women life expectancy was lowest in Glasgow, at 78 years.