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Data

Central death rate

HMD
See all data and research on:
Life Expectancy

What you should know about this indicator

  • The death rate is measured using the number of person-years lived during the interval.
  • Person-years refers to the combined total time that a group of people has lived. For example, if 10 people each live for 2 years, they collectively contribute 20 person-years.
  • The death rate is slightly different from the 'probability of death' during the interval, because the 'probability of death' metric uses a different denominator: the number of people alive at that age at the start of the interval, while this indicator uses the average number of people alive during the interval.
Central death rate
HMD
The death rate, calculated as the number of deaths divided by the average number of people alive during the year.
Source
Human Mortality Database (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
December 1, 2024
Next expected update
December 2025
Date range
1751–2023
Unit
deaths per 1,000 people

Explore charts that include this data

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Human Mortality Database

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) is a research resource that provides detailed mortality and population data for national populations with high-quality vital statistics. It includes original calculations of death rates and life tables, as well as the underlying data — such as birth counts, death counts, and census-based population estimates — used to produce these metrics.

Its scope is limited to countries with virtually complete death registration and census coverage, mostly wealthy and industrialized nations. The database’s core mission is to document the historical rise in human longevity and support research into its causes and implications. HMD follows a rigorous, uniform methodology focused on transparency, reproducibility, and comparability, while acknowledging limitations such as age misreporting and data coverage issues.

Each country’s dataset is curated and quality-checked by dedicated researchers, ensuring reliability for demographic and public health analysis.

Retrieved on
November 27, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.mortality.org/Data/ZippedDataFiles
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
HMD. Human Mortality Database. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany), University of California, Berkeley (USA), and French Institute for Demographic Studies (France). Available at www.mortality.org.
See also the methods protocol:
Wilmoth, J. R., Andreev, K., Jdanov, D., Glei, D. A., Riffe, T., Boe, C., Bubenheim, M., Philipov, D., Shkolnikov, V., Vachon, P., Winant, C., & Barbieri, M. (2021). Methods protocol for the human mortality database (v6). Available online (needs log in to mortality.org).

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) is a research resource that provides detailed mortality and population data for national populations with high-quality vital statistics. It includes original calculations of death rates and life tables, as well as the underlying data — such as birth counts, death counts, and census-based population estimates — used to produce these metrics.

Its scope is limited to countries with virtually complete death registration and census coverage, mostly wealthy and industrialized nations. The database’s core mission is to document the historical rise in human longevity and support research into its causes and implications. HMD follows a rigorous, uniform methodology focused on transparency, reproducibility, and comparability, while acknowledging limitations such as age misreporting and data coverage issues.

Each country’s dataset is curated and quality-checked by dedicated researchers, ensuring reliability for demographic and public health analysis.

Retrieved on
November 27, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.mortality.org/Data/ZippedDataFiles
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
HMD. Human Mortality Database. Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany), University of California, Berkeley (USA), and French Institute for Demographic Studies (France). Available at www.mortality.org.
See also the methods protocol:
Wilmoth, J. R., Andreev, K., Jdanov, D., Glei, D. A., Riffe, T., Boe, C., Bubenheim, M., Philipov, D., Shkolnikov, V., Vachon, P., Winant, C., & Barbieri, M. (2021). Methods protocol for the human mortality database (v6). Available online (needs log in to mortality.org).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

This indicator has been estimated by dividing the number of annual deaths by the population that year, as reported by the source.

Note that the source provides data on death rate only by age groups, and not for the total population.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Central death rate”, part of the following publication: Saloni Dattani, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Hannah Ritchie, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Life Expectancy”. Data adapted from Human Mortality Database. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250725-104452/grapher/crude-death-rate-hmd.html [online resource] (archived on July 25, 2025).
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Human Mortality Database (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Human Mortality Database (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Central death rate – HMD” [dataset]. Human Mortality Database, “Human Mortality Database” [original data]. Retrieved August 3, 2025 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250725-104452/grapher/crude-death-rate-hmd.html (archived on July 25, 2025).