How long you'll live

What age will I die?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 14, 20264 sources

Nobody can tell you that, and a site that gives you a date is guessing. What we can give you is an average and a range. By the 2024 US life table, a 50-year-old woman reaches about 84 on average and a man about 80, and the way you live moves your own number by years.

Why can’t anyone give you a date?

People type this half as a joke, and plenty of quiz sites answer with an exact age or even a day. It feels precise, so it feels true. But look at how spread out real lives are, even for people who start in the same place.

Take 100 American women who are 50 today. By the 2024 life table, the middle half of them will live to somewhere between 77 and 92. A quarter will have fewer years than that and a quarter more. For 100 men of 50, the middle half lands between about 72 and 89. That’s a 15-year spread for people of the same age, sex and country, before anyone has asked a single question about how they live.

The simple version

A life expectancy works like a weather forecast. “70% chance of rain” is a useful number. It’s right about a big group of days like today, and you’d be smart to bring an umbrella. But it can’t tell you the minute the first drop falls, and a forecaster who claimed to know that would be making it up.

How long do people your age live?

The averages rise as you get older, because every year you live takes away the chance of dying at that age. These are the 2024 US averages, the ages people reach from where they are now.

Every age from 50 to 85 has its own page with the odds of reaching 80, 90 and 100, starting at 50. The age lookup works for any age.

What moves your own number?

The best evidence comes from Harvard’s long-running nurse and health professional studies. Researchers followed 123,219 US adults for up to 34 years and counted five habits: never smoking, a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9, at least 30 minutes a day of moderate or vigorous activity, a diet in the top 40% for quality, and moderate drinking.

At 50, women with all five could expect 43.1 more years and women with none 29.0. For men it was 37.6 against 25.5. That’s about 14 extra years for women and 12 for men, from the same starting age.

The study counted light drinking as a healthy habit, so people who never drank scored as missing it. Later work that kept former drinkers apart from lifelong non-drinkers found light drinkers didn’t live longer (Zhao 2023, 107 studies). We never count drinking as something to add, and the drinking page has the detail.

These are cohort studies, so they show what happened to people with these habits rather than proving each habit caused the years. The habits were self-reported, and most of the people were white health professionals. Our calculator applies the same study’s numbers to the 2024 life table, the way the researchers built their own estimates.

What a good estimate looks like

A good estimate starts from the national life table for your age and sex, adjusts it by how much your habits changed risk in a big study, and shows you a range with the formula printed underneath. How accurate are these calculators? has the red flags to look for.