What Is the Most Common Age to Die in America?

Many people confuse two numbers: life expectancy and the age at which most people actually die. They are not the same. This article gives both, using official government data.

What is the most common age to die?

Older than most people expect. The Social Security Administration publishes a life table showing how many of every 100,000 people born alive are still living at each age. Using the 2023 table, we worked out the age at which the most deaths happen, and the age that splits deaths in half (the median).

	Men	Women
Most common age at death	87	89
Median age at death	about 80	about 85
Reach age 65	79.1%	87.4%
Reach age 85	35.5%	49.5%
Reach age 90	19.1%	30.5%
Reach age 100	1.0%	2.8%
Die before age 65	20.9%	12.6%

These are our calculations from the Social Security table, not figures the agency publishes. The median is the age by which half of deaths have occurred.

Why isn’t this the same as life expectancy?

Because life expectancy is an average, and early deaths pull it down. The CDC reports that life expectancy at birth was 79.0 years in 2024, with 76.5 for men and 81.4 for women. But the life table shows that about 21 percent of men and 13 percent of women die before 65. Those earlier deaths lower the average, even though the most common age at death is in the late 80s.

How many deaths happen at older ages?

A large share. The CDC counted 3,072,666 deaths in the United States in 2024, and 890,240 of them, about 29 percent, were people aged 85 and older. The death rate in that age group was 13,834 per 100,000 people, compared with 14.5 per 100,000 for children aged 5 to 14.

What does “period” mean in a life table?

It means the table assumes today’s death rates stay the same. The Social Security Administration explains that a period life table is based on the mortality of a population over a short time, here the year 2023. It describes a hypothetical group, not people who were actually born in a given year. Real people’s lives may turn out longer or shorter if death rates change.

How much longer do people live once they reach old age?

Quite a bit. The CDC’s 2023 life tables show that a person aged 65 could expect to live 19.5 more years, to age 84.5, and a person aged 85 could expect 6.7 more years, to 91.7.

Where can I learn more?

See How the Life Expectancy of Americans Changed Over the Last Century, Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men?, and What Are the Leading Causes of Death in the United States?.