U.S. death – Provisional CDC data show the U.S. recorded 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025—the lowest on record—continuing a sharp turnaround driven largely by falling overdose deaths among younger adults.
On a year when many Americans could reasonably feel health news was only getting worse, the numbers have moved in the other direction.
Provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week show the United States recorded 689.2 deaths per 100. 000 people in 2025. That is the lowest death rate on record, and it is also the lowest level since the U.S. began keeping organized data more than 125 years ago. The decline isn’t just a dip after the pandemic—its lowest point reaches back before COVID and. given public health advances across the 20th century. it is almost certainly the lowest death rate across roughly the entire 250-year history of the country.
The new age-adjusted rate is down 4.6 percent from the year before, and about 4 percent below where it was in 2019 before the pandemic. If the trend holds, American life expectancy is likely to reach another record high in 2025 after hitting 79 years for the first time in 2024.
For a country that has spent much of the last decade seeing life expectancy stall and even fall—dropping from 78.9 years in 2014 to 76.4 years in 2021—this is a reversal with real stakes. Covid played a major role, killing more than a million Americans. But even before the pandemic, death rates were rising due to drug overdoses, gun homicides, alcohol, and metabolic disease.
Now, the provisional data show the U.S. has resumed its long-term pattern of falling death rates and rising life expectancy. One factor towers over the rest: a dramatic decline in drug overdoses that have killed tens of thousands of young Americans over the past few decades.
In 2013, 3,105 Americans died from an overdose of synthetic opioids—fentanyl. In the decade that followed, deaths from synthetic opioids rose 23-fold to 72,776 in 2023. That increase fed into an overdose spike that hit 114,000 in the 12 months ending in late 2023. The problem can feel immovable when numbers like that dominate the news.
But by 2025, overdose deaths had fallen to roughly 70,000—down nearly 40 percent in two years. Researchers credit some combination of wider naloxone distribution. a shift in the illicit fentanyl supply. and a grim mechanical effect: the population of drug users has already lost many of its most vulnerable members.
Those changes matter for life expectancy in a way that can be easy to overlook. Overdose deaths affect the national average more than almost any other cause, largely because of who they kill. A death at 29 subtracts far more years from the national total than a death at 89.
Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau described the impact directly: as the decline in drug overdose among younger adults continues. it will have “a more measurable impact on the overall life expectancy of the population.” The trend is visible in the numbers themselves—overall death rates for Americans ages 25 to 34 fell about 16 percent in 2024 alone. and kept falling in 2025.
As overdose deaths fell, so did homicides. The national murder rate fell about 13 percent in 2023 and roughly 15 percent in 2024. when it was at the time the largest one-year drop on record. The rate is now on track to fall another 20-plus percent in 2025. which would set a new record for the largest single-year decline ever.
Covid deaths have also come down. They declined 37 percent in 2024, when the virus dropped from the 10th leading cause of death to the 15th. While Covid deaths cut the other direction—primarily taking older Americans rather than younger adults—they were part of a broader decline in deaths from all sorts of causes. In 2024, age-adjusted death rates fell for all ten of the leading causes of death, including heart disease and cancer. Taken together, the latest data point to an all-around shift toward a less deadly country.
The renewed gains fit an older story the U.S. has lived before. Shortly after the 100th anniversary of the United States’ founding, American life expectancy was less than 40 years. Today, an American born now can expect roughly four additional decades of life compared with someone born around that centennial. The scale of that shift is essentially unprecedented in human history.
Doctors deserve credit, but much of the improvement came from less glamorous work—plumbers, sanitary engineers, and vaccine makers. The CDC credited control of infectious disease alone with much of a 29-year jump in life expectancy over the 20th century. driven by clean water. sewage systems. food safety. childhood immunization. and antibiotics. In 1900, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrheal disease caused a third of all deaths, with 40 percent occurring in children under 5. By 1926, the U.S. had a life expectancy slightly below that of contemporary Somalia. By the end of the 20th century, those ancient diseases were essentially a rounding error.
Today’s main killers are slower diseases of old age, and progress is still happening there. Cancer death rates are down 34 percent since 1991. which the article says means an estimated 4.8 million deaths were averted—roughly the population of Louisiana—thanks to less smoking. earlier detection. and better drugs. Deaths from heart attacks have fallen for decades.
A new wave of medicines is now changing what people think is possible. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic have pushed adult obesity down from a record 39.9 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2025. the first sustained decline in a generation. Obesity matters because it feeds four of the ten leading causes of death: heart disease. several cancers. diabetes. and kidney disease.
The benefit may extend beyond weight loss. In a 17,000-person trial, semaglutide cut the risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular death by 20 percent.
No one knows what happens when tens of millions take these drugs for decades rather than thousands for a few years. Still, the hope is that the GLP-1 era could extend Americans’ lives the way statins and the war on smoking once did.
Even with the momentum, the U.S. isn’t catching up to the top tier. Life expectancy at 79 years trails the average of comparable wealthy nations—Japan, Switzerland, Australia, and France—by 3.7 years. The gap is still tied to deaths among people dying young. The U.S. death rate under age 70 is nearly double the average in peer countries.
The country spends far more on health care than those countries and still gets shorter lives in return.
Inside the U.S., the averages hide sharp inequality. Life expectancy in Hawaii runs about eight years longer than in West Virginia. and being born in the wrong state can cost more years than a lifetime of smoking. The richest 1 percent of American men live about 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent. The gap between Americans with a college degree and those without has widened to 8.5 years. up from about 2.5 in the early 1990s—though the article adds that the expansion of college means that non-grads tend to be poorer and less healthy than they were 30-plus years ago. intensifying the difference.
Even where the nation has recovered, some forces behind the lost decade have not gone away. Steven Woolf. a mortality researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University. said the primary forces behind the lost decade of life—guns. alcohol. and metabolic disease—“have not been resolved. and they’re continuing to claim lives.”.
The existence of better outcomes elsewhere is part of what makes this moment resonate. Japan and Switzerland aren’t inherently healthier than the U.S.; they’re evidence that additional years of American life are “sitting on the table. ” reachable with tools that already exist. The article points to the promise of longevity medicine. even while warning that the field can be overhyped. and emphasizing that the real goal is not only more years but more years in good health.
The day the article was written also marks the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. which includes the phrase “life. liberty. and the pursuit of happiness.” When it comes to pursuing happiness. the piece says. the U.S. hasn’t quite caught up—and liberty hasn’t been looking all that great lately. But on the matter of life, it concludes, America is again a success story.
CDC death rate life expectancy 2025 drug overdoses synthetic opioids fentanyl homicides Covid GLP-1 Ozempic semaglutide