Life Expectancy by Country

What drives the gaps between regions

The countries at the top of the rankings share a recognisable cluster of features: universal or near-universal healthcare, low rates of childhood mortality, diets relatively rich in vegetables, fish and whole grains, low smoking rates among the young, and high household incomes that translate into safer housing, cleaner air and earlier disease detection. Japan combines all of these with a particularly low rate of cardiovascular disease, partly attributed to dietary patterns. Switzerland, Norway and Australia score high on healthcare access and outdoor activity. Singapore and South Korea have made the largest jumps in the past 40 years, gaining more than a decade of life expectancy as they industrialised and built modern health systems.

Western Europe forms a tight cluster a couple of years behind the leaders, with the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain typically in the 81–83 range. The United States is the outlier among rich countries, sitting closer to 77–78 — several years below peers at similar income levels. The main drivers are well-documented: a higher obesity rate, a much higher rate of drug-overdose and firearm deaths, large gaps in healthcare access, and worse outcomes for cardiovascular disease and maternal mortality. The US gap is not a story about genetics or geography; it is a story about policy and access.

Eastern Europe has historically lagged Western Europe by 5–10 years, with much of the difference traceable to heavy alcohol consumption (particularly spirits), high smoking rates among men, and the lingering effects of the post-Soviet healthcare transition. Russia in particular has one of the largest male-female life-expectancy gaps in the world — over a decade in some years — driven by mortality from alcohol-related causes among working-age men.

Sub-Saharan Africa sits at the bottom of the rankings for a combination of reasons that have little to do with adult lifestyle. Child mortality, while falling, is still high enough in many countries to pull period life expectancy down sharply: a child who dies at age 2 reduces the at-birth average far more than an adult who dies at 70. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, malaria, maternal mortality, undernutrition and limited access to surgical and emergency care all compound. Conditional life expectancy — the remaining years for someone who has already reached, say, 60 — is much closer to global norms than the at-birth figure suggests, which is exactly the gap the calculator's age-conditional adjustment exists to correct.

Across essentially every country, women outlive men by 4–7 years. The gap is part biological (oestrogen appears to be cardio-protective in pre-menopausal women) and part behavioural (men smoke more, drink more, work more dangerous jobs and die more often from accidents and violence in young adulthood). The gap is smallest in countries where women's behavioural risk profiles have converged with men's, and largest where heavy male alcohol consumption is the norm.