US life expectancy hits a new high as deaths from overdoses and COVID fall

An American born in 2024 can expect to live to age 79, on average, an increase of more than half a year from 2023, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics released Thursday.

The average U.S. life expectancy hit an all-time high in 2024, according to the NCHS data, as the nation continued to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deaths from drug overdoses continued to decline.

The new high surpasses the last peak in life expectancy in 2019, and it's the highest since the government started tracking this key measure of the nation's health and well-being in 1900.

"It's good news," says Robert Anderson, the chief of the statistical analysis and surveillance branch in the division of vital statistics at the NCHS, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We seem to have rebounded from the pandemic. This may just signal that we're back to some semblance of normal post-pandemic."

Anderson and other experts cautioned, however, that significant disparities remain among Americans and that the U.S. still lags behind other wealthy nations.

"We should celebrate. It's very encouraging to see that mortality is declining and life expectancy is increasing in the United States," says Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. "But we still see very high mortality from drugs, very high mortality from suicide, infant mortality remains high and maternal mortality remains high. So as we celebrate we still have a lot of work ahead."

U.S. life expectancy fell in recent years because of a surge in drug overdoses and deaths from COVID-19. But life expectancy has been slowly inching back up since the pandemic ended in 2023 and drug overdoses began falling.

The latest rebound seems to have been caused primarily by a continued drop in deaths from drug overdoses and from COVID, Anderson says. In fact, COVID dropped out of the top 10 causes of death in 2024 for the first time since the pandemic. At the peak of the pandemic, COVID was the third leading cause of death. Now it's No. 15.

"The declines in COVID-19 mortality and drug overdose mortality — those were the two main drivers," Anderson says.

Anderson stressed that COVID and drug overdoses are still killing many Americans. Nearly 80,000 Americans died from drug overdoses and more than 30,000 died from COVID in 2024.

And while the improvements in death rates appear to have benefited all ages, races and genders, there are still significant disparities between states, between counties within states and between different races and ethnic groups.

"Unfortunately, many people are still left behind," University of Washington's Mokdad says.

In addition, U.S. life expectancy hasn't rebounded nearly as quickly as it has in other countries, and the nation remains far behind other well-off countries, such as Australia, Spain and Japan.

"We're nowhere near the upper range for developed countries in the world in terms of life expectancy even at 79 years," Anderson says. "Most of the developed countries are over 80 years, in terms of life expectancy. So we still lag behind other countries."

Anderson says the 2025 life expectancy data look promising so far for further improvement, but it's too early to know for sure. But many public health experts worry that Trump administration policies could reverse progress.

"Under the current administration, the policies are moving in the opposite direction: reduced regulations on industry, reduced access to health care, cuts in funding for medical research, widening income inequality, raising prices," says Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University. "All of this is going to have adverse effects on health."

Woolf adds: "We worry that the crisis conditions that we were already seeing before the pandemic came along will continue to deepen unless we adopt policies that really would make America healthy again."

The Trump administration disputes that characterization and says that under Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., fighting chronic diseases and other health problems is a top priority.

"For the first time in history, under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, HHS is putting Americans first with decisive action to confront the nation's chronic disease epidemic," said department spokesman Andrew Nixon in an email to NPR. "HHS is shifting attention toward prevention, nutrition, and chronic disease reduction. Historic reforms like the MAHA Strategy, which includes more than 120 initiatives to tackle the root causes of childhood chronic disease, and the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines, show we are delivering real change."

Nixon added: "We continue to reverse Biden-era policies that made Americans sicker, stripped away health choices, and wasted taxpayer money."
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