U.S. life expectancy increased in 2023, following a decline during the COVID-19 pandemic. While death rates fell for leading causes, the improvement is slowing, indicating a long road to recovery.
U.S. life expectancy jumped last year, and preliminary data suggests there may be another — much smaller — improvement this year. Death rates fell last year for almost all leading causes, notably COVID-19 , heart disease and drug overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts note it’s part of a bounce-back from the COVID-19 pandemic. But life expectancy has not yet climbed back to prepandemic levels, and the rebound appears to be losing steam.
“What you’re seeing is continued improvement, but slowing improvement,” said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a University Minnesota researcher who studies death trends. “We are sort of converging back to some kind of normal that is worse than it was before the pandemic.” Last year, nearly 3.1 million U.S. residents died, about 189,000 fewer than the year before. Death rates declined across all racial and ethnic groups, and in both men and women. Provisional data for the first 10 months of 2024 suggests the country is on track to see even fewer deaths this year, perhaps about 13,000 fewer. But that difference is likely to narrow as more death certificates come in, said the CDC’s Robert Anderson. That means that life expectancy for 2024 likely will rise — ”but probably not by a lot,” said Anderson, who oversees death tracking at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a baby born in a given year might expect to live, given death rates at that time. It’s a fundamental measure of a population’s health. For decades, U.S. life expectancy rose at least a little bit almost every year, thanks to medical advances and public health measures. It peaked in 2014, at nearly 79 years, and then was relatively flat for several year
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