Health layer
Life Expectancy by country
Compare modelled period life expectancy at birth across countries.
Compare life expectancy across countries on an interactive world map. Open any country for the latest value, the comparable-sample rank, the source, and the method.
What this measures
Longer modelled period life expectancy; shorter modelled period life expectancy.
Unit: years. Life expectancy at birth.
Methodology
Values are World Bank World Development Indicators SP.DYN.LE00.IN: life expectancy at birth, total population, in years. The figure is a period life-table estimate — the number of years a newborn would live if current age-specific mortality rates remained constant throughout life. It is not observed average age at death, a forecast of one newborn's actual lifespan, healthy life expectancy, a healthcare-quality score, or a development index. WDI compiles UN World Population Prospects, national statistical-office publications, and Eurostat Demographic Statistics into one annual series; those source families coexist and are not labelled row by row. WDI notes that UN WPP annual figures may be interpolated from five-year period data. UN WPP 2024 treats 1950-2023 as estimates and 2024-2100 as projections; 2024 is therefore omitted even though WDI publishes that year. OurBlueDot does not interpolate, fill missing years, replace missing values with zero, or add projections. Country rows are joined by ISO 3166-1 alpha-3; regional and income aggregates are excluded. Map ranks are comparable-sample competition ranks among currently loaded countries (rank 1 is the highest life expectancy). Missing countries remain without a value.
Example countries
Open life expectancy for a geographically diverse set of countries that currently have a comparable value. This is a crawl path, not a ranking.
Highest and lowest values
These lists use the same comparable-sample ranking as the map for 2023. They include only countries with a finite value among 193 available observations. Missing countries are unranked. This is not a complete world ranking.
High observed values
- Monaco — 86.37 years
- San Marino — 85.71 years
- Liechtenstein — 84.6 years
- Switzerland — 84.16 years
- Japan — 84.04 years
Low observed values
- Nigeria — 54.46 years
- Chad — 55.07 years
- Lesotho — 57.38 years
- Central African Republic — 57.41 years
- South Sudan — 57.62 years
Coverage & source
- Source
- World Bank World Development Indicators
- License
- CC BY 4.0
- Period
- 2023
- Frequency
- Annual
- Data nature
- modelled
How to read this layer
- Highest and lowest figures on this page are comparable-sample observations, not a complete world ranking. What does a rank mean?
Rankings, where shown, describe only countries with comparable values in the selected period.