Life expectancy by country.

Most pages titled “life expectancy by country” show a long list. This page shows two entries, and the reason is a rule we hold everywhere on this site: we publish a number only when we can point at the official release it came from and reproduce it.

The United States value comes from the Social Security Administration period life table for 2023, published for the 2026 Trustees Report. The United Kingdom value comes from the Office for National Statistics national life tables for 2022 to 2024. Both are public, both are transcribed into files you can download, and both are checked against the source.

Adding a third country would mean either repeating that transcription work for its national statistics office, or quoting a figure we have not verified. The second option would put an unverified number beside two verified ones. A reader could not tell which was which. So we leave the gap open instead of filling it with something we cannot stand behind.

If your country is not here, the honest answer is that this site has no estimate for you. You can still use the life-in-weeks calendar, which works from a horizon you choose and needs no mortality table at all.

The United Kingdom numbers sit slightly above the United States numbers at age 18 and age 40, the two columns almost touch at age 65, and they cross over at age 80. That shape is more informative than the headline difference.

The first reason is the period. The U.S. table uses mortality rates for 2023 alone. The U.K. table covers 2022 to 2024. A single year and a three-year average can be pulled apart by one bad influenza season, one heat wave or one change in how deaths are registered. Nothing here isolates those effects.

The second reason is the population. The Social Security area population is not the same as the population of the 50 states. It also includes residents of Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, federal civilian employees and service members abroad with their dependents, non-citizens abroad who are insured for Social Security benefits, and other U.S. citizens abroad. The ONS table describes the United Kingdom. Two different populations produce two different averages even in the same year.

The third reason is the method. Each statistics office builds its table from its own data sources, its own age-aggregation choices and its own publication rules. We did not reconcile those choices, and we do not claim to have.

That is why the convergence near the end of life matters. At age 80 the two tables are effectively equal. The differences at younger ages come mostly from events that people at 80 have already survived. A country comparison is really a comparison of mortality before old age, not of maximum lifespan.

A country average is a mean over millions of people. It does not sort those people by income, region, occupation, access to care or anything else. Two countries can hold the same average while their internal distributions differ a great deal.

It also cannot answer the question a reader usually has. “Life expectancy by country” is often asked in order to find the best country to live in. This table cannot answer that, because the value is not a property you can carry across a border. Moving does not transfer another population's mortality rates to you.

Finally, the numbers move. Every new release replaces the last one, and a period table reflects one window of mortality rather than a forecast of medical progress. A country that ranks higher this year may not rank higher in five years. Any single ranking should carry its release year, which is why this page names both.

For an age-by-age lookup in one country, use the U.S. life expectancy by age table. To see the male and female gap inside each table, read life expectancy by sex.