AUDIO – THE ELDERLY ENDURE –
Jan. 28, 2026 – The average U.S. life expectancy hit an all-time high in 2024, according to the NCHS data, as the nation continued to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and deaths from drug overdoses continued to decline.
The new high surpasses the last peak in life expectancy in 2019, and it’s the highest since the government started tracking this in 1900. “It’s good news,” says Robert Anderson, the chief of the statistical analysis and surveillance branch in the division of vital statistics at the NCHS, a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We seem to have rebounded from the pandemic. This may just signal that we’re back to some semblance of normal post-pandemic.”
Anderson and other experts cautioned, however, that significant disparities remain among Americans and that the U.S. still lags behind other wealthy nations.
“We should celebrate. It’s very encouraging to see that mortality is declining and life expectancy is increasing in the United States,” says Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at the University of Washington. “But we still see very high mortality from drugs, very high mortality from suicide, infant mortality remains high and maternal mortality remains high. So as we celebrate we still have a lot of work ahead.”
