Life expectancy calculator

The "life expectancy" figure you see in headlines is the average for a newborn. Your number is higher — sometimes a lot higher — because you've already survived the riskiest decades. Set your country, sex, and current age below to see the figure that actually applies to you.

Why "expected age" rises as you get older

Life expectancy at birth bakes in the risk of dying young — from infant mortality, accidents in the teens and twenties, early-onset cancers. Once you've cleared those, the risk doesn't carry forward; your remaining expected years no longer include them. So the total age you're expected to reach climbs as you age. An Australian newborn male is expected to reach 81; an Australian man who's already 60 is expected to reach 84.

This is why retirement planning uses different tables than headline news. The Australian Government Actuary publishes the Australian Life Tables; the US Social Security Administration publishes Period Life Tables; both project decades of remaining life for anyone retiring in their sixties.

The country that leads — and the gap behind it

Japan has held the top spot for women's life expectancy at birth for most of the last forty years; the 2023 figure from Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare was 87.1 years for women, 81.1 for men. Switzerland, Australia and Singapore are close behind in the 83–85 band. The United States, despite spending more per capita on health than any other country, sits well below at 79.0 years (2024 CDC NCHS provisional, up from a 2021 COVID-era trough of 76.4).

Healthspan ≠ lifespan

The World Health Organization also publishes healthy life expectancy (HALE) — the average years lived in good health. Globally HALE is roughly 9–13 years lower than life expectancy. In Australia, life expectancy at birth is ~83 but HALE is ~70: the typical person lives about thirteen years in some form of poor health at the end. The longevity argument worth caring about isn't really how many years you'll get; it's the gap between those two numbers.

What this calculator doesn't know about you

National actuarial tables average across everyone. Your personal expectation is modified — sometimes by several years — by factors the calculator does not see:

• Smoking shortens life by an average of about 10 years (Doll et al., BMJ 2004, 50-year follow-up of British doctors).
• Severe obesity (BMI ≥40) takes ~6–8 years off (Prospective Studies Collaboration, Lancet 2009).
• Regular physical activity adds 3–7 years over a sedentary life (Lee et al., Lancet 2012).
• Heavy drinking ( gt 14 standard drinks/week) shortens life; moderate drinking is contested, with recent meta-analyses finding no protective effect once confounders are removed.
• Socioeconomic position creates gaps of 5–10 years between the richest and poorest deciles within the same country.

The ceiling

The longest verified human life remains Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, who died on 4 August 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days. Nobody since has come within five years of her age. A 2016 Nature paper by Jan Vijg and colleagues argued the maximum is plateauing near 115; a 2018 Science paper by Barbi et al. argued mortality risk levels off at extreme ages, which would imply no fixed ceiling. The debate is unresolved. For most readers it's academic — the gap between healthy life and total life is the more useful number to optimise.

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The headline number was the one your grandparents read. The number for someone your age, today, is the one above.