Why Americans are living longer again

The US death rate just hit a record low, and there’s reason to hope the trend will continue.

America is a uniquely sick, unhealthy country — just ask Americans. We’re addicted to ultraprocessed food and succumb to deaths of despair. The current US health secretary, who insists we’ve been raising the “sickest generation” ever, has built an entire political movement around the idea that there is something uniquely unwell about America as a country.

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So it might surprise you to learn that the US actually just set a new record low in its death rate, the average American’s odds of dying in a given year. According to provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) this week, the US registered 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025. That is the lowest level on record. Not the lowest level since the Covid pandemic. The lowest level since the US started keeping organized data more than 125 years ago, and given the obvious public health advances in the 20th century, it is almost certainly America’s lowest death rate through the entire 250 years of its existence.

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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. Translate that dropping death rate into years of life gained, and it’s likely US life expectancy will come in at another record high in 2025, after reaching 79 years for the first time in 2024.

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In fairness, it’s reasonable to be surprised. The US may not be the toxic hellhole some MAHA adherents think, but for most of the past decade plus, the country experienced something that’s not supposed to happen to a rich nation: life expectancy stalled and dropped, going from 78.9 years in 2014 all the way down to 76.4 percent in 2021. Covid was obviously the major factor, killing more than a million Americans, but even before the pandemic, death rates were rising thanks to drug overdoses, gun homicides, alcohol, and metabolic disease.

But the latest data shows the US has resumed its long-term trend of ever-falling death rates and rising life expectancy. This is how we got back on track.

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The single biggest factor is the dramatic decline in drug overdoses that have killed tens of thousands of young Americans over the past few decades.

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In 2013, just 3,105 Americans died from an overdose of synthetic opioids — which basically meant fentanyl. In the decade that followed, deaths from synthetic opioids went up 23-fold to 72,776 in 2023, the major factor in an overdose spike that hit 114,000 in the 12 months ending in late 2023. The problem seemed unsolvable.

And yet, by 2025, overdose deaths had fallen to........

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