About 80,000 people in the United States are centenarians, and roughly 722,000 live worldwide as of recent estimates. That number is growing fast: the U.S. centenarian population jumped 50% between 2010 and 2020, from 53,364 to 80,139. Globally, projections suggest 3.7 million people will be aged 100 or older by 2050.
How Rare Is Reaching 100?
In the 2020 U.S. Census, centenarians accounted for just 2 out of every 10,000 people. That’s a tiny fraction of the population, but the raw numbers are climbing quickly. The male centenarian population grew by 85.3% over that decade, compared with 42.9% growth among women. Better healthcare, improved nutrition, and declining smoking rates are all pushing more people past the century mark.
The Northeast had the highest concentration of centenarians in the U.S. at 3.19 per 10,000 people, compared with the national average of 2.42. Certain pockets around the world have dramatically higher rates. In Sardinia, Italy, about 0.51% of people born between 1880 and 1900 reached 100, roughly five times the European average. On the Greek island of Ikaria, 2.5% of recorded deaths occurred among centenarians. In Okinawa, Japan, the percentage of centenarians was once nearly seven times higher than in the rest of the country. And in the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica, men aged 60 to 69 were seven times more likely to reach 100 than Japanese men of the same era, despite Japan being the longest-lived country at the time.
Women Dominate the Numbers
Centenarians are overwhelmingly female. In the U.S., 78.8% of people aged 100 and older in 2020 were women. Globally, about 85% of centenarians are women and 15% are men, according to the New England Centenarian Study. The typical ratio of men to women among centenarians ranges from 1:4 to 1:7 across most populations studied.
There are exceptions. In Sardinia, the ratio is closer to 1:2, and in some mountainous villages it approaches 1:1. Researchers have explored whether population genetics in these isolated regions play a role, but no definitive explanation exists. The broader trend is clear, though: women have a substantial survival advantage at extreme ages, likely driven by a combination of hormonal, genetic, and behavioral factors.
Genetics vs. Lifestyle
About 25% of the variation in human lifespan is determined by genetics. The rest comes down to how you live. For the first seven or eight decades of life, lifestyle is the stronger force: eating well, staying physically active, avoiding tobacco, and limiting alcohol. After 80, genetics appears to play a progressively larger role in keeping people healthy and alive.
This means that reaching your 80s is largely within your control, but getting from 80 to 100 involves a degree of biological luck. Centenarians tend to carry genetic variants that protect against age-related diseases, and some of these protective genes appear to run in families. Studies of centenarian siblings consistently find that brothers and sisters of centenarians are far more likely to reach extreme ages themselves.
Centenarians Stay Healthier Longer
One of the most striking findings about centenarians is that they don’t just live longer with chronic disease. They delay disease onset dramatically. In a study comparing centenarians with average-lifespan controls, the median age of morbidity onset in the general population was 71 years. For centenarians, it was 95. For people who lived past 110 (supercentenarians), it was 109.
Heart disease illustrates this well. A quarter of people in the general population had developed cardiovascular disease by age 75. Among centenarians, that same milestone didn’t arrive until age 91. Among supercentenarians, it was 102. This pattern, sometimes called “compression of morbidity,” means that many centenarians spend the vast majority of their lives in good health, with serious illness compressed into a relatively short period at the very end. Their health span closely approximates their life span.
Living Past 110
Supercentenarians, people validated to have lived to 110 or beyond, are extraordinarily rare. The Gerontology Research Group currently tracks 218 validated living supercentenarians worldwide. These individuals represent the absolute far edge of human survival, and nearly all of them are women.
Reaching 110 appears to require an even more favorable genetic profile than reaching 100. Supercentenarians tend to have remarkably few chronic conditions for their age, and their cognitive and physical function often holds up better than expected well into their final years. The number of supercentenarians is growing as the centenarian population expands, but it remains vanishingly small relative to the global population of over 8 billion.
The Centenarian Population Is Accelerating
The global centenarian population is projected to reach 3.7 million by 2050, roughly an eightfold increase from recent levels. Several forces are driving this growth. The large baby boom generation is aging into its 80s and 90s. Medical advances continue to reduce mortality from heart disease, cancer, and stroke. And public health improvements in earlier decades mean more people are arriving at old age in better baseline health.
The gender gap is also narrowing. In the U.S., the male centenarian population nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020 while the female population grew by about 43%. Men are closing the gap, likely because male smoking rates have fallen sharply and cardiovascular care has improved. If these trends hold, future centenarian populations will be less lopsidedly female than today’s, though women will almost certainly remain the majority.