Americans died at the lowest rate ever recorded last year, according to new federal figures — a milestone that suggests life expectancy in the United States is climbing back toward, and likely beyond, its pre-pandemic peak. The age-adjusted death rate for 2025 fell to about 689 deaths per 100,000 people, the lowest in more than a century of tracking, CNN reported, citing provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A sharp turnaround
The number represents a remarkable reversal from the depths of the coronavirus pandemic. The age-adjusted death rate — a measure that accounts for the age makeup of the population, allowing fair comparison across years — has fallen about 22% since 2021, and now sits roughly 4% below where it was in 2019, just before COVID-19 arrived, according to the CDC's provisional report.
Because mortality and longevity move in opposite directions, a record-low death rate strongly implies a record-high life expectancy. Demographers cautioned that the figures are provisional and will shift as more death certificates are processed, but the direction is clear: fewer Americans are dying, at essentially every stage of life.
What drove the decline
Two factors stand out. The first is the retreat of the drug-overdose epidemic. Overdose deaths, while still high at roughly 70,000 in 2025, have fallen sharply from their peak — a decline that experts say played a large role in pulling the overall death rate down, particularly among younger adults who are disproportionately affected. The second is the continued fading of COVID-19, which at the height of the pandemic was among the leading causes of death in the country and has now dropped out of the top ten.
Longer-running trends contributed as well. Deaths from heart disease, still the nation's leading killer, have continued a gradual decline, which health officials attribute to a mix of better treatment and prevention. Together, these shifts added up to the lowest mortality rate the country has measured.
The disparities behind the average
A single national figure, however, conceals wide and persistent gaps. Men continued to die at a substantially higher age-adjusted rate than women — about 811 per 100,000 for men versus 583 for women in 2025. And longstanding racial disparities remain stark, with death rates for some groups far higher than for others.
Those differences are a reminder that an encouraging national headline does not mean the benefits are shared equally. Public-health researchers have long stressed that averages can mask the very inequalities that policy is meant to address, and the 2025 data are no exception.
Why it matters
Population-wide death rates are one of the broadest measures of a society's health, capturing the combined effect of medicine, public health, behavior and economics. A record low is a genuinely good-news story — evidence that some of the forces that drove US mortality up in recent years, above all overdoses and the pandemic, have eased.
The caveats are real: the data are provisional, the gains are uneven, and single-year figures can bounce around. But taken together with the fall in overdose deaths and the fading of COVID-19, the numbers describe a country that, at least by this measure, is recovering — and, for the first time in years, living longer.
