Life expectancy

For centuries, life expectancy at birth in England was between 30 and 40 years. One of the major reasons why life expectancy was so low was that infant and child mortality rates were so high.

Adults who survived childhood often lived into their 60s or older. However, as we'll see later, life expectancy has increased at all ages, including for those in their 60s, 70s and 80s.

Life expectancy started to increase in the second half of the 19th century, and has roughly doubled since then. In 2023, it was 81 years.

Women in the UK live around four years longer than men, on average. In England and Wales, life expectancy at birth was 83.5 years for women and 79.6 for men in 2024. That's roughly a doubling since 1841.

The gap between women and men has narrowed since around 1970, when it was more than six years. This is largely because deaths from heart disease and illnesses linked to tobacco, which were much more common among men, have fallen.

How does life expectancy compare across the four UK nations? You can see this in the chart.

Life expectancy is highest in England and lowest in Scotland, where men live more than two years less than in England.

In all nations, life expectancy increased a lot in the 1980s, '90s and 2000s. Since the early 2010s, improvements have slowed, and COVID-19 caused life expectancy to fall from 2020 to 2022.

Since then, things have recovered. Female life expectancy has increased to pre-pandemic levels, while men's was still slightly below these levels in 2024.

In the chart, you can compare life expectancy for men and women, and see life expectancy at older ages (at 65 years).

It's often claimed that life expectancy has only increased due to declines in infant and child mortality. This isn't true: life expectancy has increased at all ages.

In the chart, you can see estimates for how long a woman in the UK can expect to live once she's reached 65, 75, or 85.

At current death rates, a woman in the UK who has reached 65 can expect to live to 86, and one who has reached 85 can expect to live to almost 92.

That represents a significant increase since 1980; back then, a woman who had reached 65 would only be expected to live to 82.

Because some people die at younger ages, life expectancy is lower than the age at which most people die.

The most common age at death in the UK is now around 90 for women and 87 for men, up from 84 and 77 in the early 1980s.

Half of women — shown by the median age — live to at least 86, and half of men to at least 83.

If death rates across society and ages today did not change, how long would we expect boys and girls born today to live until?

At today's death rates, a fifth of boys and a third of girls would live to 90. In the early 1980s, it was just 5% of boys and 14% of girls.

70% of girls, and 58% of boys would live until they were 80.

The figures above are based on death rates in a given year. But death rates are expected to keep falling, so people born today will probably live longer.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) projects that girls born in 2024 will live, on average, to 90 and boys to 87: around seven years longer than the previous measure of period life expectancy suggests.

Life expectancy varies by around 10 years across local authorities.

In the map you can see this data for men across the UK. Life expectancy was lowest for men in Blackpool at 73.7 years, and highest in Hart, in Hampshire, at 83.7 years.

Among women, it ranged from 78.7 years in Glasgow City to 87.1 years in Kensington and Chelsea.

You can explore this data for men and women, at birth and the age of 65 using the chart options.

Life expectancy tends to be lower among those living on lower incomes.

In England in 2024, men in the most deprived tenth of areas could expect to live 73.2 years, more than 10 years less than men in the least deprived tenth (83.6). For women, the gap was 8 years.

The gap in life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas of England has widened over the past decade, from 9 years for men and 7 for women in 2013, to 10 and 8 years a decade later.

Scotland's gap is even larger, at 13 years for men.

The UK has lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. In 2023, it ranked 20th out of the 23 countries in the chart: only Czechia, the United States and Poland were lower.

Life expectancy in Japan, the highest, was more than three years longer than in the UK.

You can switch the chart to compare women, men, and life expectancy at 65.

Period life expectancy is the average number of years a person would live if they experienced the death rates of a given period at every age throughout their life. It's a summary of death rates at the time, not a forecast. Most of the figures on this page are period life expectancy.

Cohort life expectancy is the average number of years people born in a given year are expected to live, allowing for projected changes in death rates over their lives.

The UK's figures come from the Office for National Statistics' national life tables, which use three years of deaths and population estimates, and from ONS's local and deprivation statistics. Scotland's deprivation figures come from National Records of Scotland, and Northern Ireland's from the Department of Health. International comparisons use UN estimates.