Life Expectancy Calculator

Enter an age of 65 and choose the Male column. Use your age at your last birthday; the table is organised by exact age.

The calculator reads the table row for 65. Average remaining years, e(65), is 18.12, so the average age at death is 83.12. The table also shows that 79,084 of every 100,000 males born reach 65, and that the chance of dying before 66 is 1.65%.

To find the chance of reaching 80, the calculator divides the survivors at 80 by the survivors at 65: 50,785 ÷ 79,084 = 64.2%. The same method gives 24.1% for reaching 90 and 1.3% for reaching 100.

The last lines show the spread. Half of 65-year-old men live past 83.8 — slightly more than the average of 83.1, because a minority of early deaths pull the average down. One in four reach 89.8, and one in ten reach 94.2. Those last two ages matter more than the average for anyone planning money that has to last.

Source: the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary publishes an actuarial life table each year with the Social Security Trustees Report. This calculator stores the 2023 period life table for the Social Security area population, as used in the 2026 Trustees Report, for every age from 0 to 119 and both sexes, exactly as published.

Each row has three numbers per sex. q(x) is the probability of dying within one year at exact age x. l(x) is the number of survivors at exact age x out of 100,000 born alive. e(x) is the period life expectancy: the average number of years remaining at exact age x.

Average remaining years = e(x), read directly. Average age at death = x + e(x).

Chance of reaching age T = l(T) ÷ l(x). This is the share of people alive at your age who are still alive at T, if the 2023 death rates applied for the rest of their lives.

Median, 1-in-4 and 1-in-10 ages: the age at which l falls to 50%, 25% or 10% of l(x), interpolated linearly between the two whole years on either side.

No lifestyle adjustments are made. Calculators that add or subtract years for smoking, exercise or diet usually combine results from different studies in ways those studies were never designed to support. This one reports the table and nothing else.

Enter 40 and choose Female. Average remaining years, e(40), is 42.64, for an average age at death of 82.64.

That is three years lower than the 85.66 average for a woman of 65. This is not an error. A 65-year-old has already survived the deaths that happen between 40 and 65, so the group she belongs to lives longer on average. Life expectancy at any age includes only the people who reached that age.

The spread for the 40-year-old is wide: 66.4% reach 80, 31.3% reach 90, half live past 85.2, one in four reach 91.6, and one in ten reach 96.1.

The same effect is strongest at birth. For a baby boy, the average is 75.79 years, but half of boys live past 80.3. Deaths in infancy, childhood and young adulthood pull the average below what most people will actually experience.

For retirement, the average age at death is the wrong planning horizon. By definition, a large share of people live past it, and running out of money at 88 is a far worse outcome than dying with some left over. That is why financial planners often plan to an age with a low chance of being outlived.

Take a 65-year-old woman. Her average age at death is 85.7, but one in four women her age reach 92.2 and one in ten reach 96.5. A plan built to 86 has roughly even odds of being too short. Built to 92, it covers three out of four; built to 96, nine out of ten.

Couples face an even longer horizon. For a man and a woman who are both 65, the chance that at least one of them reaches 90 is 50.6%, and the chance that at least one reaches 95 is 21.3%, if their survival is treated as independent. In reality couples share circumstances, so treat those as rough figures.

Carry that horizon into the retirement calculator as the number of years your savings must last. For early retirement the gap is larger still: a 45-year-old woman has a one-in-four chance of reaching 91.6, so a plan to retire at 45 may need to fund more than 45 years, which is the kind of horizon the FIRE calculator is built to test.

A period life table freezes the death rates of one year, here 2023, and asks how long people would live if those rates never changed. In reality death rates have generally fallen over time, so a period figure tends to understate how long today's younger people will live. The SSA also publishes cohort life tables that project future improvements; those give higher figures for younger ages and involve assumptions about the future that a period table avoids.

Within any age and sex group, circumstances matter a great deal. A study of U.S. tax and death records by Chetty and colleagues (*JAMA*, 2016) found that among 40-year-olds, the gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest 1% of the income distribution was about 14.6 years for men and 10.1 years for women. Health, smoking, education and access to care all separate individuals from the table average in the same way. That is why this calculator describes a population and does not attempt to describe you.

Not a personal prediction. Every figure is an average over a large population. It cannot account for your health, family history, income, behaviour or medical care.

One year's death rates. The 2023 period table assumes 2023 mortality applies for the rest of a person's life. Future improvements in medicine, or future setbacks, are not included.

Social Security area population. The table covers the population Social Security uses for its projections, which is broader than U.S. residents alone. It does not describe any other country.

Whole years only. The calculator uses your age at your last birthday and reads that row. Someone who is 65 and a half is placed in the 65 row.

Sex categories. The table is published for males and females only, and it does not describe differences within those groups.

Beyond financial planning, the parts of longevity you can change mostly run through the heart and metabolism. The Framingham cardiac risk calculator estimates your 10-year cardiovascular risk from blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes, which says far more about your own outlook than a population table can. Your BMI is a quick screening check on body weight. And for the money side, pair the longevity ages above with the retirement calculator to test whether your savings reach the horizon rather than the average.