The U.S. maternal mortality rate was 17.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2024, representing 649 women who died of maternal causes that year. That rate is more than double, sometimes triple, what most other high-income countries report, making the United States a persistent outlier among its peers.
How the Rate Has Changed in Recent Years
The 2024 rate of 17.9 per 100,000 live births was a slight drop from 18.6 in 2023, when 669 women died. Statistically, that difference isn’t significant, meaning the rate has essentially plateaued after a sharper decline from the COVID-19 pandemic peak. In 2022, the rate stood at roughly 22 per 100,000, so the broader trend since then has been downward, but progress has stalled over the past two years.
The pandemic years were particularly deadly. COVID-19 both directly caused maternal deaths and disrupted prenatal care, pushing rates to historic highs. The current numbers represent a partial recovery, not a return to pre-pandemic levels.
The U.S. Compared to Other Wealthy Nations
Among high-income countries, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate. A 2024 analysis from the Commonwealth Fund found that half of the comparable nations had fewer than five maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The U.S. rate was more than four times that benchmark. Countries with universal healthcare systems, standardized prenatal protocols, and robust postpartum follow-up consistently outperform the U.S. on this measure.
Stark Racial Disparities
National averages obscure enormous gaps by race and ethnicity. In 2023, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 50.3 per 100,000 live births. For White women it was 14.5, for Hispanic women 12.4, and for Asian women 10.7. That means Black women died at roughly 3.5 times the rate of White women and nearly five times the rate of Asian women.
These disparities persist even after accounting for education and income. Research points to a combination of factors: higher rates of chronic conditions like hypertension entering pregnancy, differences in the quality of hospitals where Black women deliver, delays in recognizing and responding to complications, and the cumulative health effects of experiencing racism over a lifetime. The gap has remained stubbornly wide for decades.
What’s Causing These Deaths
The medical causes of maternal death in the U.S. have shifted over time. Deaths from conditions traditionally associated with childbirth, like hemorrhage, severe infection, blood clots, and preeclampsia, have actually decreased. What has increased are deaths from heart-related conditions (particularly a form of heart failure called cardiomyopathy), chronic high blood pressure that predates pregnancy, and complications involving the placenta.
This shift reflects a broader change in who is giving birth. More people are entering pregnancy with preexisting health conditions like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. These conditions raise the risk of life-threatening complications during and after delivery. Maternal age plays a role too: women over 40 face significantly higher mortality rates than those under 25, and the average age at first birth has been climbing for decades.
Notably, more than a third of maternal deaths occur after delivery, not during labor. Some happen weeks or even months postpartum, often from cardiovascular events or untreated complications that emerge once a new parent has been sent home with limited follow-up.
More Than 80% Are Preventable
The CDC reports that over 80% of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. That finding comes from Maternal Mortality Review Committees, groups of clinicians and public health experts who examine each death in detail to determine what went wrong. The most common contributing factors they identify include missed or delayed diagnoses, lack of coordination among healthcare providers, inadequate access to appropriate care, and patients whose symptoms were dismissed or undertreated.
That 80% figure is what makes the U.S. rate so frustrating to public health experts. These are not deaths caused by rare, unforeseeable complications. In most cases, the medical knowledge and tools to save the patient’s life already existed. The failures were in the systems meant to deliver that care.
Wide Variation Across States
Where you live significantly affects your risk. CDC data covering 2018 through 2022 show that state-level maternal mortality rates range from 10.5 per 100,000 live births in California to 41.1 in Tennessee. California’s rate is roughly comparable to some European nations, while Tennessee’s exceeds many low-income countries.
California is often cited as a success story. The state invested heavily in standardized hospital protocols for handling obstetric emergencies like hemorrhage and preeclampsia, along with quality improvement collaboratives that trained hospital teams to respond faster. These efforts cut the state’s maternal mortality rate substantially over the past 15 years. States with higher rates tend to have larger uninsured populations, fewer OB-GYN providers (particularly in rural areas), higher rates of chronic disease, and shorter windows of postpartum Medicaid coverage.
Many states with small populations have too few maternal deaths to calculate a reliable rate, which means the true geographic picture is incomplete. But the overall pattern is clear: the South and parts of the Midwest consistently report the highest rates, while the West Coast and Northeast tend to report lower ones.