Life Expectancy by Country: Why the Gap Is 30 Years

About 73 years globally, up 25 since 1950 — but ranging from the low 50s to over 84

A child born today can expect to live about 73 years on average — roughly 25 years longer than a child born in 1950. It is one of the largest improvements in human welfare ever recorded, and it is distributed very unevenly.

The spread between countries

The highest national life expectancies now exceed 84 years — Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, Spain, Italy, and Australia cluster near the top. At the other end, several countries in sub-Saharan Africa remain in the low-to-mid 50s, including Chad, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic.

A gap of roughly thirty years separates the two ends. Born in one country rather than another, a person's expected lifespan differs by more than a third.

What the number actually measures

This is the most misread statistic in demography. Life expectancy at birth is not how long people typically live. It is the average age at death across everyone born in a given year, assuming current mortality rates hold.

Because it is an average that includes infant deaths, high child mortality drags it down hard. A society where half of children die before five but survivors routinely reach seventy will report a life expectancy near forty — and almost nobody in it will actually die at forty.

This is why the common claim that "medieval people died at thirty" is wrong. Medieval child mortality was appalling; adults who survived childhood often lived into their sixties. The average describes the population, not a typical life.

Why it rose so fast

The 25-year global gain since 1950 came mostly from keeping children alive, not from extending old age.

• Child mortality collapsed. Global under-five deaths fell from around 1 in 4 in 1950 to under 1 in 25 today. Nothing else moves the average as much.
• Infectious disease retreated. Vaccination, antibiotics, and oral rehydration therapy removed the diseases that killed children in the largest numbers.
• Clean water and sanitation spread. Unglamorous infrastructure, and one of the largest contributors.
• Maternal mortality fell sharply, adding years for women specifically.

Gains at the top end have been real but smaller. Wealthy countries added years mainly through reduced cardiovascular death — better blood pressure control, statins, and falling smoking rates — which shows up in the sixties and seventies rather than in childhood.

The women-and-men gap

Women outlive men essentially everywhere — typically by 4 to 6 years, and by nearly 10 in parts of Eastern Europe. The gap has both biological and behavioural components, and the behavioural part is large: smoking, alcohol, occupational risk, and violent and accidental death all skew heavily male. Where those behaviours converge between the sexes, the gap narrows.

Progress is not guaranteed

Life expectancy can and does fall. It dropped across most of the world during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020–21, with the United States losing more than two years — its steepest decline since the Second World War. Most countries have since recovered, but not all have returned to trend.

Longer-run reversals happen too. Russia's male life expectancy fell sharply through the 1990s amid economic collapse and rising alcohol-related deaths. The United States saw several consecutive years of decline in the 2010s driven substantially by drug overdoses.

These reversals matter for population projections: rising life expectancy is one of the two forces holding total population up while fertility falls. For what people are actually dying of, see our breakdown of deaths by cause.