The average life span in America is 79.0 years, based on 2024 data from the CDC. That number represents an increase of 0.6 years from 2023 and marks a record high for the country. Women live significantly longer than men: 81.4 years compared to 76.5 years, a gap of nearly five years.
Why Life Expectancy Rose in 2024
The 2024 gain was driven by falling death rates across all ten leading causes of death. The biggest single improvement came from unintentional injuries, a category that includes drug overdoses and car accidents, where the death rate dropped 14.4% in a single year. Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic lung disease, kidney disease, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, stroke, and suicide all declined as well, though by smaller margins of roughly 1% to 4%.
Heart disease remains the top killer, followed by cancer and unintentional injuries. Together, the ten leading causes account for about 71% of all deaths in the country. Opioid overdoses alone shaved an estimated 0.67 years off national life expectancy in 2022, so even a partial reduction in overdose deaths has an outsized effect on the overall number.
How the US Compares to Other Wealthy Nations
Despite reaching a record high, 79 years still places the United States last among comparable high-income countries. The average across peer nations is 82.7 years, putting Americans nearly four years behind. Countries like Japan, Switzerland, and Australia consistently sit at the top of that list. The gap has widened over recent decades, even as US spending on health care far exceeds that of its peers.
The Gender Gap
American women outlive men by 4.9 years. This pattern holds across virtually every country in the world, but the size of the gap varies. Men die at higher rates from heart disease, drug overdoses, suicide, and homicide, all of which pull their average down. The 14.4% drop in unintentional injury deaths in 2024 disproportionately benefits men, who make up the majority of overdose and accident fatalities, so the gender gap may narrow slightly in coming years if that trend continues.
Differences by Race and Geography
National averages obscure enormous variation within the country. A Lancet analysis that broke the US into ten distinct population groups found a 20-year gap between the longest- and shortest-lived groups. Asian Americans had the highest life expectancy at 84.0 years. Latino populations outside the Southwest averaged 79.4 years. White Americans in most of the country fell around 77 years, while white residents of low-income Appalachia and the Lower Mississippi Valley averaged just 71.1 years.
Black Americans in highly segregated metro areas averaged 71.5 years, and Black populations in the rural, low-income South averaged 68.0 years. The shortest-lived group was Native Americans in the Western US, at just 63.6 years. These figures are from 2021, when COVID-19 was still heavily influencing mortality, but the underlying patterns of disparity predate the pandemic by decades.
State-level data tells a similar story. Hawaii leads the country at 79.9 years, while Mississippi trails at 70.9 years, a nine-year difference. Southern states with higher rates of poverty, obesity, and limited access to health care cluster at the bottom of the rankings.
Income Is One of the Strongest Predictors
A landmark study published through the National Institutes of Health found that the richest 1% of American men live 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1%. For women, the gap is 10.1 years. That difference is larger than the gap between the US and many developing nations. Income influences life span through multiple channels: access to health care, quality of nutrition, exposure to environmental hazards, chronic stress, and the likelihood of working in physically dangerous jobs. Where you live matters partly because it reflects these same economic forces. Wealthier areas tend to have lower smoking rates, more opportunities for physical activity, and better-funded hospitals.
Recent Trajectory
US life expectancy followed a long upward climb for most of the 20th century, then stalled around 2014. A surge in drug overdose deaths, rising rates of so-called “deaths of despair” (suicide, alcoholism, overdoses), and increasing obesity-related disease all contributed to a plateau that alarmed public health researchers. Then COVID-19 pushed life expectancy sharply downward, from 78.8 years in 2019 to roughly 77 years in 2020 and 2021.
The recovery since then has been steady. The jump to 78.4 in 2023 and 79.0 in 2024 means the US has now surpassed its pre-pandemic peak. Whether this upward trend continues depends heavily on what happens with overdose deaths, obesity-related conditions like diabetes and heart disease, and whether the improvements in cancer treatment and prevention continue to lower mortality rates year over year.