Life Expectancy Calculator – How Long Might You Live? (SSA 2023 Table)
Enter your age and sex and read your future the way actuaries do: straight from the U.S. Social Security Administration’s 2023 life table. You get the years you have left on average, the age you are expected to reach, your odds of seeing 65, 85, 90 and 100 — and the full survival curve for people exactly your age.
About you
🔒 Everything is calculated in your browser — your numbers never leave your device.
Your result
| Milestone | Chance | In plain terms |
|---|---|---|
| Reach age 65 | 89.8% | about 90 of 100 |
| Reach age 85 | 50.8% | about 51 of 100 |
| Reach age 90 | 31.3% | about 31 of 100 |
| Reach age 100 | 2.8% | about 3 of 100 |
📊 These are averages for the whole U.S. population in the SSA table — not a personal prediction. Your own health, habits and family history move your personal odds a long way in either direction; the FAQ below explains what the table can and cannot say.
- Every figure is a lookup or a ratio from the official SSA 2023 period life table — no model, no guesswork. A 40-year-old woman averages 42.6 years remaining.
- The average is the centre of a distribution, not a deadline: a plan that ends at the average has roughly a coin flip’s chance of outliving its money.
- A period table freezes today’s death rates, and a table average describes a group — it must not be read as a prediction about any individual life.
- Your survival curve
- Tools that plan with this number
- How this calculator works
- The math behind the default example
- Two ideas worth keeping
- Remaining life expectancy at key ages
- Reading the table across a lifetime
- Planning to the average is planning to run out
- Period tables, cohort tables, and the future nobody has measured
- What this number is not: information, not a verdict
- A worked planning example: two 40-year-olds
Your survival curve
Of every 100 people alive at your age, how many are still alive at each birthday after it? That falling line is the table’s whole story in one picture — and the dashed line marks the median, the age by which half have died.
Survival curve for women now aged 40 — the share still alive at each later age, out of every 100 alive at 40. Dashed line: the median age at death, 85.2.
Tools that plan with this number
A lifespan estimate is really a planning horizon — these tools turn it into money and dates.
How this calculator works
No model, no guesswork — every figure is a lookup or a ratio from one official table.
Enter your age and sex
Whole years, 0 to 119. The SSA publishes separate mortality tables for males and females, so the answer depends on both — pick the row that matches the records the table was built from.
The table answers
Your row gives e, the average years remaining for people who have reached your age. The milestone odds are just as direct: survivors at 85 divided by survivors at your age.
Read a range, not a date
The average, the median and the milestone odds describe a spread of outcomes. Half of people outlive the median — plan with the whole picture, never with one number.
The math behind the default example
Step 1 — the lookup. The SSA 2023 table follows 100,000 newborns through life. In the women’s column, 97,350 of them are still alive at 40, and the table’s e for that row — the average years remaining — is 42.64 years.
Step 2 — the expected age. 40 + 42.64 = 82.6. That is the average age at death for women who have already reached 40 — noticeably higher than the 81.1 average for a newborn girl, because reaching 40 means having survived everything that ends lives earlier.
Step 3 — a milestone odd. Of the 97,350 women alive at 40, the table shows 49,469 still alive at 85. So the chance of reaching 85 is 49,469 ÷ 97,350 = 50.8% — almost exactly a coin flip. Reaching 100 is 2,758 ÷ 97,350 = 2.8%.
Step 4 — the median. Half of 97,350 is 48,675 survivors. The counts fall through that line between age 85 (49,469 alive) and 86 (45,919 alive), which interpolates to 85.2 — half of 40-year-old women live past 85.2, half die before it. Notice the median (85.2) sits above the average-based figure (82.6): the deep-dive below explains why.
Two ideas worth keeping
Why the average undersells your chances — and why this table freezes time on purpose.
Life expectancy e is a mean — an average across everyone alive at your age. But deaths are not spread evenly around it. A minority die comparatively young, and those early deaths pull the average down, while nobody can pull it up by living to 200. The result: the median age at death — the point where exactly half are still alive — is higher than the age the average suggests. For the default example on this page, a 40-year-old woman’s average points to 82.6, yet her median is 85.2.
The spread keeps going. One in four women aged 40 is still alive at 91.6. That long right-hand tail is exactly why retirement planners warn against budgeting to the average: if you plan your money to run out at the mean, you have roughly a coin flip’s chance of outliving it. The median and the milestone odds on this page exist so you can see the whole distribution, not just its centre of gravity.
This calculator uses a period life table: it takes the death rates actually recorded in a single year — 2023 — at every age, and applies them to one hypothetical group of 100,000 newborns as they grow old. It answers: “If today’s rates never changed, how long would people live?” That is a clean, checkable question with an official answer.
A cohort table asks a harder one: it follows a real generation (say, everyone born in 1985) and forecasts how death rates will improve over their actual lifetimes. Because medicine and safety tend to improve, cohort estimates usually come out a few years higher — but they rest on projections about the future, not measurements. The SSA publishes the period table as its headline figure, and it is the one used throughout this page; treat the difference as a reminder that your personal figure depends on a future nobody has measured yet.
Remaining life expectancy at key ages
Straight from the SSA 2023 period life table — years left on average, and the age that adds up to, for men and women at milestone birthdays.
| Age | Men — years left | Women — years left | Men — live to (avg) | Women — live to (avg) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 75.79 | 81.06 | 75.8 | 81.1 |
| 5 | 71.34 | 76.55 | 76.3 | 81.5 |
| 10 | 66.39 | 71.59 | 76.4 | 81.6 |
| 20 | 56.69 | 61.74 | 76.7 | 81.7 |
| 30 | 47.50 | 52.08 | 77.5 | 82.1 |
| 40 | 38.59 | 42.64 | 78.6 | 82.6 |
| 50 | 29.90 | 33.45 | 79.9 | 83.5 |
| 60 | 21.79 | 24.73 | 81.8 | 84.7 |
| 65 | 18.12 | 20.66 | 83.1 | 85.7 |
| 70 | 14.66 | 16.76 | 84.7 | 86.8 |
| 80 | 8.50 | 9.82 | 88.5 | 89.8 |
| 90 | 4.11 | 4.80 | 94.1 | 94.8 |
| 100 | 2.04 | 2.23 | 102.0 | 102.2 |
Source: U.S. Social Security Administration, Period Life Table 2023 (2026 Trustees Report). Notice the pattern the FAQ explains: the “live to” column rises with age, because each row counts only people who have already survived to that age.
Reading the table across a lifetime
Life expectancy rises as you survive, and the table on this page shows the rise at every milestone birthday, from the SSA 2023 period life table.
A newborn girl is expected to live to 81.1 on average, and a newborn boy to 75.8. By age 20 those averages have risen to 81.7 for women and 76.7 for men, because surviving childhood and adolescence removes the earliest risks. By age 40, the default example on this page, the averages are 82.6 for women and 78.6 for men. By age 60 they are 84.7 and 81.8. By age 80 they are 89.8 and 88.5. The pattern never reverses: every birthday survived raises the average age at death, because the people who did not survive are no longer in the group, and the group that remains is, by definition, the group that has lived this long.
| Age | Men: years left | Women: years left | Men: live to (avg) | Women: live to (avg) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 75.79 | 81.06 | 75.8 | 81.1 |
| 20 | 56.69 | 61.74 | 76.7 | 81.7 |
| 40 | 38.59 | 42.64 | 78.6 | 82.6 |
| 60 | 21.79 | 24.73 | 81.8 | 84.7 |
| 80 | 8.50 | 9.82 | 88.5 | 89.8 |
| 90 | 4.11 | 4.80 | 94.1 | 94.8 |
The sex gap narrows with age, which is itself informative. At birth the gap in average years remaining is about 5.3 years. At 40 it is 4.05 years. At 80 it is 1.32 years. The gap narrows because the excess male mortality that drives it is concentrated in the middle years; by 80, the men who remain are a more selected group, and their remaining prospects look much closer to the women’s. A couple planning together should therefore not apply the birth gap at every age. The relevant gap is the one at their current ages, and it is smaller than the headline gap most people quote.
One more feature of the table deserves attention: the years remaining fall more slowly than age rises. From 40 to 60, twenty birthdays pass, but the years remaining for women fall only from 42.64 to 24.73, a drop of about 18 years, not 20. The missing two years are the survivors’ bonus: living through those twenty years itself adds about two years to the average. That is why a retirement plan built at 40 around living to 82.6 needs revisiting at 60, when the average has moved to 84.7. The plan did not fail. The table moved, because the planner survived.
Planning to the average is planning to run out
The average is the centre of a distribution, not a deadline, and a plan that ends at the average has roughly a coin flip’s chance of outliving its money.
The default example makes the point precisely. A 40-year-old woman’s average points to 82.6, yet her median age at death is 85.2: half of women aged 40 live past 85.2, and half die before it. The milestone odds fill in the rest of the picture: 89.8 percent reach 65, 50.8 percent reach 85, 31.3 percent reach 90, and 2.8 percent reach 100. One in four women aged 40 is still alive at 91.6. A retirement plan that funds spending to 82.6, the average, therefore leaves about half of its owners still alive with no money, and leaves one in four owners alive nearly a decade past the plan’s end.
The reason the median sits above the average is the shape of deaths. A minority die comparatively young, and those early deaths pull the average down, while nobody can pull it up by living to 200. The distribution has a long right-hand tail: a small number of people live very long lives, and those lives stretch the tail without moving the average much, because they are few. But for planning purposes the tail is the risk. The cost of planning to 91.6 and dying at 85 is unspent money. The cost of planning to 82.6 and living to 91.6 is years without income. The two costs are not symmetric, and that asymmetry is why planners warn against budgeting to the mean.
The practical response is to plan against a milestone, not a mean. Pick an age that a meaningful share of people at your age reach, such as the age one in four reaches, and fund the plan to that age, accepting that some money may be left over. For a 40-year-old woman that age is 91.6 on this table. For a 40-year-old man the corresponding figure is lower, because the men’s distribution is shifted earlier, and the calculator’s milestone odds for a man’s age and sex give the equivalent picture. The exact percentile is a judgement call, and it depends on what else funds the later years, but the direction is not: plan past the average, because the average is where half the people are still alive.
Period tables, cohort tables, and the future nobody has measured
This calculator uses a period life table, which freezes today’s death rates and applies them to a hypothetical group. That freeze is both its strength and its limit.
A period table takes the death rates actually recorded in a single year, 2023, at every age, and applies them to 100,000 hypothetical newborns as they grow old. It answers a clean, checkable question: if today’s rates never changed, how long would people live? The answer for a 40-year-old woman is 42.64 further years on average, and every figure on this page can be traced to a counted death rate in 2023. There is no forecasting in a period table, and that is why the SSA publishes it as its headline figure: it is a measurement, not a prediction.
A cohort table asks a harder question. It follows a real generation, such as everyone born in 1985, and forecasts how death rates will improve over their actual lifetimes. Because medicine, safety and living conditions tend to improve, cohort estimates usually come out a few years higher than period estimates for the same age. But they rest on projections about a future nobody has measured, and different forecasters produce different cohort figures from the same starting data. The gap between the two is a reminder, not an error: your personal figure depends partly on a future that has not happened yet, and no table, period or cohort, can measure it in advance.
For planning, the period figure should be treated as a floor with a known direction of bias. If death rates continue to improve, as they have for most of modern history, real lifetimes will run longer than the period table suggests, and a plan built to the period median will end early for more people than the table implies. If death rates worsen, the reverse holds, but the long-run direction has been improvement. The honest use of this calculator is therefore to take its figures as the measured baseline, plan past them as the previous section argues, and revisit the plan as new tables are published, because each new period table re-measures the baseline against the latest year of deaths.
What this number is not: information, not a verdict
A table average describes a group. It does not describe you, and it must not be read as a prediction about any individual life.
The table knows only age and sex. It does not know health, family history, occupation, smoking, exercise, income, or any of the other factors that move an individual’s prospects far more than the few years separating one table row from the next. Two 40-year-old women with the same table row can have very different personal prospects, and the table cannot distinguish them, because it was never designed to. Its rows are group averages, and group averages are the wrong tool for individual prediction, however precise they look. A figure quoted to two decimal places, 42.64 years, is precise about the group and silent about the individual.
That silence has a practical consequence for how the result should be used. It is useful for planning: for sizing a retirement horizon, for understanding why a plan should run past the average, and for comparing the shape of mortality across ages and between the sexes. It is not useful for deciding when to retire as a personal deadline, for pricing an individual’s choices, or for reassuring or alarming anyone about their own lifespan. Anyone who needs an individual assessment, for insurance, medical or financial decisions that depend on personal health, should seek qualified professional advice that takes their own circumstances into account, rather than reading a verdict off a table row.
Finally, the table is dated, and its date matters. It is the SSA 2023 period life table, built from death rates recorded in 2023. A later table will differ, because each year of deaths re-measures the rates at every age. The question on this page about whether the 2023 table is out of date is therefore the right question to ask, and the answer is that it is the latest official measurement this calculator uses, not a timeless constant. Check the table year before comparing figures across sources, and expect the figures to move, slowly, as new tables appear.
A worked planning example: two 40-year-olds
The table rows for a 40-year-old man and a 40-year-old woman, read together, show why a couple’s plan must run past either partner’s average.
Take a 40-year-old woman first. Her average points to 82.6, her median is 85.2, and one in four women her age is still alive at 91.6. Take a 40-year-old man. His average points to 78.6, and his remaining years are 38.59 against her 42.64, a gap of 4.05 years at this age. A plan built to the woman’s average, 82.6, leaves her with about a coin flip’s chance of outliving it, and leaves the man, whose own average is lower, in the same position relative to his own figure. A plan built to the man’s average, 78.6, is worse for both: it ends before either partner’s median, and it ends more than a decade before the age one in four women aged 40 reaches.
The plan that respects the table runs to the later horizon, not to an average of the two. For this couple that means funding spending at least to the woman’s one-in-four age of 91.6, because the couple’s plan ends when the second partner dies, and the survivor’s years are the ones a plan built to a single average misses. The cost of that choice is unspent money if both partners die earlier. The cost of the alternative is years without income for the survivor, and those two costs are not symmetric. The table cannot choose the percentile for a particular couple, because the right percentile depends on what else funds the later years, on health, and on how much bequest matters. But it can rule out the average as a planning age, for either partner, because the average is where half the people are still alive.
A snapshot, not a forecast
Period life expectancy — the headline number — applies one year’s death rates at every age to a hypothetical cohort of 100,000 newborns and averages the years lived. It freezes today’s mortality and asks what would happen if it never changed. That is why it can fall sharply in a crisis year without dooming babies born that year, and why cohort life expectancy (following real people through improving mortality) usually exceeds the period figure. Read any life-expectancy number as “if today’s conditions persisted”, never as a prediction about a real person.
Why the average misleads about individuals
Within-country gaps by income, education, and region can exceed 10 years — larger than many between-country gaps — and individual variation dwarfs even those: identical risk profiles can produce lifespans 40 years apart through accidents, infections, genetics, and chance. The honest uses of life expectancy are population comparison, insurance and annuity pricing (where averages are meaningful), and retirement planning with a margin — fund to 90 or 95 even if expectancy is 82, because half the population outlives the average. It is not a personal deadline.
Life expectancy questions, answered
What the table really says, why the numbers move the way they do, and what they leave out.
Is this my personal life expectancy?
No — and no honest calculator can give you that. Every figure here is a population average from the SSA’s 2023 period life table: what happens to a large group of people of your age and sex if 2023 death rates stay fixed. Your own health, smoking, blood pressure, occupation, income and family history shift your personal odds substantially in either direction. Use the result as a planning backdrop — the horizon your savings and insurance should be able to cover — never as a prediction about you.
What is a period life table?
A period life table takes the death rates recorded in one single year — here, 2023 — at every age, and runs a hypothetical group of 100,000 newborns through them: at each birthday, that year’s rate for that age removes its share, and the survivors move on. The ‘life expectancy’ column (e) is the average years remaining for the survivors at each age. Because it uses only measured rates from one year, it is a snapshot, not a forecast — which is exactly why the SSA publishes it as the official standard.
Why does my expected age go UP as I get older?
Survivorship. The average at birth — 75.8 years for men, 81.1 for women in the 2023 table — is dragged down by everyone who dies in childhood, in accidents, or in middle age. Once you have reached 40 or 65, you have already come through those risks, so they stop counting against you. Your remaining years shrink as you age, but they shrink by less than a year per year lived: a man of 65 averages another 18.1 years, an expected total of 83.1 — over seven years more than the average quoted at his birth.
Why does a 65-year-old man still get another 18 years?
Because the figure is conditional on reaching 65, and it is an average across everyone alive at 65. The SSA table shows that of 100,000 newborn boys, 79,084 reach 65 — and from there, about 44.9% reach 85 and about 24.1% reach 90. Those long lives pull the average up to 18.12 more years, an expected age of 83.1. The median tells the same story from the other side: half of 65-year-old men live past 83.8. Nobody is promised those years — but as a group, 65-year-olds have far more of them left than intuition suggests.
Is the 2023 table out of date?
No — it is the newest official table the SSA publishes. This page uses the Period Life Table 2023, released with the 2026 Trustees Report and fetched from ssa.gov in October 2026. The SSA finalizes mortality data with a lag and updates the table as new years are completed, so there is always a gap between the table’s year and today. A period table is deliberately a snapshot of one measured year rather than a guess about the present, and year-to-year changes in life expectancy are usually small fractions of a year.
Why do women get more years than men in the table?
Because in the 2023 data, female death rates are lower than male rates at almost every age. A newborn girl averages 81.1 years against a boy’s 75.8 — a gap of 5.3 years. By age 65 the gap has narrowed to about 2.5 years (20.7 against 18.1), because the men most at risk earlier in life are no longer in the group. Researchers attribute the pattern to a mix of biology, occupational risk, driving and risk behavior, and rates of heart disease and smoking. They are population patterns, not a rule for any individual man or woman.
Why is life expectancy at birth lower than at age 40?
Because reaching 40 means surviving everything that ends lives earlier. A newborn girl’s average is 81.1, but a 40-year-old woman’s average is 82.6, and a newborn boy’s 75.8 rises to 78.6 by age 40. The newborn figure averages over everyone, including those who die young, while the age-40 figure averages only over people who have already reached 40. Every birthday survived removes the people who did not survive from the group, so the average age at death for the remaining group rises. That is also why the figure keeps rising with age: at 80, the average age at death is 89.8 for women and 88.5 for men.
Does this table include future medical progress?
No. This calculator uses a period life table, which takes the death rates actually recorded in 2023 at every age and applies them to a hypothetical group, as if those rates never changed. It is a measurement of 2023, not a forecast. A cohort table, which follows a real generation and forecasts how death rates will improve over their lifetimes, usually comes out a few years higher, because medicine and safety tend to improve. But cohort figures rest on projections, and different forecasters produce different ones. Treat the period figure as a measured baseline with a known direction of bias: if death rates keep improving, real lifetimes will run longer than this table suggests.
How should a couple use this calculator together?
Run it once for each person, on their own age and sex, and plan against the later of the two horizons, not the average of the two. A couple’s financial plan ends when the second partner dies, not when the first does, and the survivor’s years are often the ones a plan built to a single average misses. The sex gap also narrows with age: at birth it is about 5.3 years, at 40 it is 4.05 years, and at 80 it is 1.32 years, so use the gap at your current ages, not the headline birth gap. For each partner, look at the milestone odds and the median, not just the average, and fund the plan to an age that a meaningful share of people at that age reach.
Is this calculator a prediction about my own lifespan?
No, and it must not be read as one. The table knows only age and sex. It does not know health, family history, occupation, smoking, exercise, income, or any of the other factors that move an individual’s prospects far more than the few years separating one table row from the next. A figure quoted to two decimal places, such as 42.64 years for a 40-year-old woman, is precise about the group and silent about the individual. Use the result for planning, for sizing a retirement horizon, and for understanding the shape of mortality across ages. For any decision that depends on personal health, seek qualified professional advice that takes your own circumstances into account.
How is life expectancy calculated?
From a period life table: one year's age-specific death rates applied to a hypothetical cohort, averaged into years lived. It is a snapshot of current mortality, not a forecast.
What is cohort life expectancy?
The average lifespan of a real birth cohort followed through its actual, changing death rates. It usually exceeds period life expectancy because mortality improves over time.
Why do countries differ so much?
Infant and child mortality, infectious disease, diet, smoking, obesity, alcohol, violent death, and healthcare access — with within-country income and education gaps often larger than between-country gaps.
Can I use life expectancy for retirement planning?
Yes, with a margin: plan funding to 90–95 even if expectancy is lower, because half of people outlive the average and outliving savings is costlier than over-saving.
More planning tools
Retirement money, benefits and body numbers that share this page’s time horizon.
Retirement Calculator
Growth and drawdown of retirement savings.
🏛️Social Security Calculator
Your estimated benefit at each claiming age.
🎂Age Calculator
Exact age and days to your next birthday.
⚖️BMI Calculator
Body mass index and its healthy range.
💷Pension Calculator
What a pension pot could pay you.
📖How Life Expectancy Is Calculated
Life tables, country averages, and honest accuracy.