The average number of years that a person can expect to live. This figure is often adjusted for an individual’s sex, race, age, and other demographic considerations. The average life expectancy of Americans in 2020 was 77.3 years.
Deeper dive
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes life expectancy tables for the population at birth, age 65 and age 75 broken down by age and sex. The U.S. Census Bureau also publishes life expectancy data.
While the average life expectancy for a baby born in the United States has been rising for much of the past century, it declined by 1.5 years from 2019 to 2020 from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77.3 years in 2020. This is the lowest level since 2003, according to new provisional data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). The drop in life expectancy in 2020 was the largest one-year decline since World War II .
There are also significant disparities in life expectancy. Notably, women live five years longer than men, on average, and whites of both sexes live longer than Blacks. Of all groups, Black men have the lowest life expectancy.
Longer life expectancies generally reflect reductions in infant mortality and improvements in medical care. As people live longer, new questions arise about their roles in society, the best ways to ensure their ongoing health, the nature of retirement, and the cost of programs targeting the elderly, among many other issues.
Residents of several other nations live longer than Americans, according to data from the World Health Organization. A relatively new concept in this field is “healthy life expectancy” – the average number of years that a person can expect to live in full health, free of disease or injury.