Lifespan by CountryWhat the numbers mean
One source, three life expectancy series, and the year always in view.
Life expectancy at birth
Period life expectancy describes how many years a newborn would live under the age-specific mortality rates of a particular year. It summarises mortality at all ages, including infancy. It is not the average age of people currently dying, a cohort forecast, or the number of years someone already alive has left.
Future medical care, living conditions and mortality rates may differ. We do not turn these population figures into a personal life expectancy calculator.
Source and snapshot
All life expectancy values come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI), API source 2. We fetched the snapshot on 2026-09-14. The API reports its last update as 2026-07-13; the latest observations are for 2024. These dates describe different things.
SP.DYN.LE00.IN: total life expectancy at birth.SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN: female life expectancy at birth.SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN: male life expectancy at birth.
The World Bank identifies underlying sources including the UN World Population Prospects, national statistical offices and Eurostat. These series combine estimates and national statistics; data quality and uncertainty vary across economies. WDI values may be revised retrospectively.
Country and region coverage
We include 217 countries and economies from the World Bank country metadata, excluding entries marked as aggregates. The list includes territories and is not a list of sovereign states. Country names follow the source, including some abbreviations.
We use the seven current geographical regions including all income levels. Afghanistan and Pakistan appear in “Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan”. The current country grouping is used throughout this snapshot, not a historical reconstruction of membership each year.
World and regional values are the published WDI aggregates. We do not average the country values ourselves. Aggregated figures cannot describe the full range of conditions inside a region or country.
Latest values and comparisons
A country’s latest figure is its most recent non-missing total. Female and male values and the sex gap use that same year. The headline date is an observation year, not the current calendar year. At this retrieval, all 217 country totals are available for 2024.
The sex gap is female minus male life expectancy, in years. The total is taken directly from WDI: it is not calculated as the arithmetic average of those two series. A regional difference is country total minus the regional aggregate for the same year.
History and change
The history spans the latest year minus 30 through the latest year, inclusive: 31 annual observations over a 30-year interval. The change subtracts the value exactly 30 years earlier from the latest total. If either endpoint is missing, we do not substitute a nearby year.
Missing data are displayed as “Not available”. Lines break at missing observations, with no interpolation. The history chart’s vertical scale adapts to the series; labelled axes and the annual table show the actual values. The measuring ribbon always uses a 0–100-year scale. Neither graphic is a survival curve.
Ranking and rounding
The world ranking compares total life expectancy in 2024. Region tables rank the countries in that region for the same year. Higher unrounded values rank first; exact ties share a rank, with the next rank skipped. Missing totals are excluded and the table reports its coverage.
Headline values use one decimal place; annual tables use two. All differences and rankings are calculated before rounding, so a displayed difference can differ slightly from subtracting two rounded headlines. Small rank differences should not be treated as meaningful without considering the source’s uncertainty.
Verification
Three 2024 totals were cross-checked against the CSV download linked from the World Bank’s own indicator pages on 2026-09-14: Japan 84.0363414634146, India 72.235 and United States 78.890243902439 years. The reproducible validation checks preserve these exact values and compare them with the API snapshot.
Reuse and attribution
Data: World Bank, World Development Indicators, life expectancy at birth (total, female and male), retrieved 2026-09-14, licensed under CC BY 4.0, subject to the World Bank dataset terms. This site rounds, ranks and calculates differences from the original data. The World Bank does not endorse this site.
Photographs have separate credits beside each image. Commons banners are cropped and converted to WebP; their stated licences apply to the photographs. Fonts are self-hosted.
Sources
- World Bank WDI: life expectancy at birth, total (CC BY 4.0; accessed 2026-09-14)
- World Bank WDI: life expectancy at birth, male (CC BY 4.0; accessed 2026-09-14)
- World Bank WDI: life expectancy at birth, female (CC BY 4.0; accessed 2026-09-14)
- World Bank country and region metadata (World Bank dataset terms; accessed 2026-09-14)