Life Expectancy Calculator

Life expectancy at a given age is the average number of years a person of that exact age and sex would still live if one recent year's death rates applied for the rest of their life¹. It isn't a formula in the usual sense; it's a lookup against real, published mortality data. Every year, the Social Security Administration's Office of the Chief Actuary compiles a Period Life Table from actual mortality experience, the same table used in the agency's own Trustees Report to project the solvency of Social Security itself¹.

What This Calculator Measures

This returns remaining life expectancy in years for a given current age and sex, plus the one-year probability of death at that age, both based on the same published table. It also shows the approximate age those remaining years would take you to.

The Formula

Rather than computing anything from your health, the calculator stores remaining life expectancy and the one-year probability of death for each sex at every age from 0 to 5, where death rates change fastest, and then at 5-year ages up to 100. For an age between two of those points, it reads the value along a straight line:

Value = value at lower age + (your age − lower age) ÷ 5 × (value at next age − value at lower age)

So a 62-year-old gets a figure 40% of the way from the age-60 value to the age-65 value. Approximate age is simply your current age plus the remaining years.

How This Calculator Computes Your Result

Enter your current age (0 to 100) and sex. We look up your age in the stored figures, interpolating between 5-year ages, and return remaining life expectancy in years, the approximate age it implies, and the one-year probability of death at that age.

Reference Values From the SSA Table

These are remaining life expectancies at selected exact ages in the SSA's 2023 period life table, as used in the 2026 Trustees Report¹:

Notice that expected total lifespan rises as you get older. A man of 65 can expect about 18 more years, reaching about 83, which is well past the 75.79 years the same table gives a newborn boy¹. That is because he has already survived the risks of the earlier decades. The table also counts how many of 100,000 people born alive would reach each age under these death rates: 79,084 men and 87,399 women would reach 65¹.

Why a Period Life Table Specifically, Not a Simpler Average

A period life table isn't just an average of how long people currently that age have lived, it's built by applying the mortality rate observed at every single age, from infancy through the oldest ages, to a hypothetical group moving through life under today's conditions². This is why government agencies use it to report on current mortality: it reflects current mortality conditions at every age simultaneously, rather than reporting on a cohort that hasn't finished living yet. For financial planning, actuaries usually adjust tables like this for expected future falls in death rates, because period figures tend to understate how long people will live.

Period vs Cohort Life Expectancy

There are two kinds of life table. A cohort table follows a real group, such as everyone born in one year, from birth until none remain. Building one needs data over many decades, and for people still alive it needs projections of future deaths². A period table instead asks what would happen to a hypothetical group that lived its whole life under the death rates of a single year, giving a snapshot of current mortality².

This calculator uses period figures. They assume today's death rates never change, so they do not build in future medical progress or setbacks. Treat your result as a description of current conditions rather than a forecast.

SSA and CDC Figures Can Differ

The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics publishes its own period life tables for the United States². The SSA table covers the Social Security area population, which adds groups such as residents of US territories and federal employees and armed forces abroad¹. Because the populations differ, the two sources can give different numbers. For a lifestyle-based estimate that does consider habits like smoking and activity, see the Biological Age Calculator.