Global life expectancy is increasing over the long term, but the trend hit a significant setback during the pandemic and hasn’t fully recovered in most countries. Before COVID-19, the world average sat around 73 years and had been climbing steadily for decades. By 2021, it had fallen back to 2012 levels, dropping to 71.4 years. Recovery is underway, and projections suggest the global average will reach roughly 78 years by 2050, but the path forward is uneven and far from guaranteed.
Where Things Stand After COVID-19
The pandemic erased years of progress almost overnight. Global life expectancy dropped from roughly 73 years in 2019 to 72.5 in 2020, then slid further to 71.4 in 2021. That second figure matched where the world had been nearly a decade earlier. As of mid-2023, 22 out of 27 countries tracked in a major international analysis still had not fully returned to their pre-pandemic levels.
The good news is that most countries are bouncing back. By 2023, 19 of those 27 countries showed year-over-year gains. The U.S. recovered by about 0.73 years, Bulgaria by 1.07 years, and Poland by 0.74 years. These are countries that were hit especially hard in the first two years of the pandemic, so their rebounds have been proportionally large. Still, “recovering” is not the same as “recovered.” Most nations are climbing back toward where they were in 2019, not surging past it.
The Long View: A Century of Gains
Zoom out, and the picture looks far more encouraging. For most of human history, average life expectancy hovered in the 30s and 40s, not because people rarely lived past 40, but because so many died as infants or young children. Once you strip out infant mortality, life expectancy in mid-Victorian England was already around 75 for men and 73 for women at age five. That’s remarkably close to modern figures, which tells you something important: much of the dramatic rise in “average” life expectancy over the past 150 years came from keeping babies and children alive, not from extending old age.
The 20th and early 21st centuries added gains on top of that foundation through antibiotics, vaccines, clean water, better nutrition, and improved treatment for heart disease and cancer. Global life expectancy climbed from about 47 years in 1950 to nearly 74 by 2019. That’s an extraordinary run, but it’s been slowing. The easy wins from reducing childhood deaths have largely been captured in wealthier nations, and the remaining gains are harder to achieve.
The Rich-Poor Divide
Life expectancy varies enormously depending on where you live and how much money you have. Across OECD countries (mostly wealthy, industrialized nations), the average was 80.3 years in 2021. Compare that to South Africa at 65.3 years, Indonesia at 68.8, or India at 70.2. Even within the OECD, countries like Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania sit below 75.
The gap within countries can be just as stark. A landmark U.S. study found that men in the top 1% of income at age 40 could expect to live to 87.3, while men in the bottom 1% could expect to reach only 72.7. That’s a 14.6-year gap. For women, the difference was 10.1 years: 88.9 versus 78.8. Income doesn’t just correlate with better healthcare access. It shapes diet, housing, stress levels, neighborhood safety, and exposure to pollution, all of which compound over a lifetime.
What’s Pulling Life Expectancy Down
Several forces are actively working against longevity gains, particularly in the United States. Opioid-related deaths reduced U.S. life expectancy by an estimated 0.67 years in 2022, up from 0.52 years in 2019. That translates to 3.1 million total years of life lost across the population, with each individual death costing an average of 38 years of life. The burden falls disproportionately on certain groups: American Indian and Alaska Native men lost 1.5 years of life expectancy to opioids alone, followed by Black men at 1.1 years and white men at 0.96 years.
Obesity and related metabolic diseases represent another drag on progress, though their exact impact on aggregate life expectancy is harder to isolate. Rising rates of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers linked to excess weight are well documented and represent a growing share of premature deaths in middle-income and high-income countries.
The Gender Gap
Women live longer than men virtually everywhere in the world, and the U.S. is no exception. In 2024, American women outlived men by 4.9 years on average, though that gap narrowed by 0.4 years compared to 2023. At age 65, the difference shrinks to 2.4 years. The gap is driven by a combination of biology (estrogen appears to offer some cardiovascular protection) and behavior (men have higher rates of smoking, heavy drinking, occupational hazards, and violent death). As these behavioral differences narrow over time, the gap has been slowly closing.
Projections Through 2050
A major forecasting study published in The BMJ projects that global life expectancy will rise from 73.6 years in 2022 to 78.2 years by 2050, a gain of nearly five years. That increase is expected to come primarily from continued reductions in infectious disease, better management of chronic conditions, and improvements in lower-income countries where childhood mortality is still relatively high.
But there’s an important caveat. Researchers studying longevity have pointed out that curing one disease of aging often increases the prevalence of another. Eliminating cancer, for example, could lead to more people developing Alzheimer’s disease simply because they live long enough to be at risk. Extending life without extending healthy life could mean more years spent with disability or chronic illness. Currently, no biomedical intervention has been proven to push human lifespan beyond its observed biological limits, roughly 115 to 120 years for the rare outliers.
Lessons From the World’s Longest-Lived Communities
Certain regions produce centenarians at rates far above the global average, and their patterns offer clues about what supports long life beyond medical intervention. In the mountainous interior of Sardinia, Italy, people born between 1880 and 1900 reached age 100 at roughly five times the European average. On the Greek island of Ikaria, the prevalence of people aged 90 and older was nearly five times higher than on the Greek mainland. In Nicoya, Costa Rica, men aged 60 to 69 were seven times as likely to reach 100 as Japanese men of the same era, at a time when Japan led the world in longevity.
Okinawa, Japan, once ranked first among all 47 Japanese prefectures for centenarian prevalence, with rates seven times the national average in the 1970s. By 2006, that advantage had shrunk to about double, likely reflecting the adoption of more westernized diets and lifestyles among younger generations. The common threads across these communities are not exotic supplements or cutting-edge medicine. They include physical activity built into daily life, plant-heavy diets, strong social connections, and a sense of purpose. These factors won’t make headlines the way a new drug does, but they consistently show up wherever people live the longest.
The Bottom Line on the Trend
Life expectancy is increasing globally over decades-long timescales, and projections suggest that will continue. But the pace of improvement is slowing in wealthy nations, the pandemic proved how fragile the gains can be, and the benefits are distributed very unevenly by geography, income, race, and sex. Whether the trend continues depends less on any single medical breakthrough and more on how societies handle the overlapping challenges of chronic disease, inequality, drug epidemics, and aging populations.