U.S. life expectancy rose to 79 years in 2024 — the highest mark in American history.
It’s the result of not only the dissipation of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also waning death rates from all the nation’s top killers, including heart disease, cancer and drug overdoses.
What’s more, preliminary statistics suggest a continued improvement in 2025.
“It’s pretty much good news all the way around,” said Robert Anderson, of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the 2024 data on Thursday.
Life expectancy, a fundamental measure of a population’s health, 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.
