Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Life expectancy at birth

female-to-male ratio, period tables – HMD
See all data and research on:
Life ExpectancyGender Ratio

What you should know about this indicator

  • Higher values indicate longer life expectancy among females than males.
  • Period life expectancy is a metric that summarizes death rates across all age groups in one particular year.
  • For a given year, it represents the average lifespan for a hypothetical group of people, if they experienced the same age-specific death rates throughout their whole lives as the age-specific death rates seen in that particular year.
  • Prior to 1950, we use HMD (2024) data. From 1950 onwards, we use UN WPP (2024) data.
Life expectancy at birth
female-to-male ratio, period tables – HMD
The ratio of period life expectancy (females/males) at a given age.
Source
Human Mortality Database (2024); UN, World Population Prospects (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
December 3, 2024
Next expected update
December 2025
Date range
1751–2023

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).

United Nations – World Population Prospects

The World Population Prospects 2024 is the 28th edition of the official estimates and projections of the global population published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality, and international migration for 237 countries or areas.

For each revision, any new, recent, and historical, information that has become available from population censuses, vital registration of births and deaths, and household surveys is considered to produce consistent time series of population estimates for each country or areas from 1950 to today

For the estimation period between 1950 and 2023, data from 1,910 censuses were considered in the present evaluation, which is 79 more than the 2022 revision. In some countries, population registers based on administrative data systems provide the necessary information. Population data from censuses or registers referring to 2019 or later were available for 114 countries or areas, representing 48 per cent of the 237 countries or areas included in this analysis (and 54 per cent of the world population). For 43 countries or areas, the most recent available population count was from the period 2014-2018, and for another 57 locations from the period 2009-2013. For the remaining 23 countries or areas, the most recent available census data were from before 2009, that is more than 15 years ago.

Retrieved on
December 2, 2024
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wpp/downloads/
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.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition.

The World Population Prospects 2024 is the 28th edition of the official estimates and projections of the global population published by the United Nations since 1951. The estimates are based on all available sources of data on population size and levels of fertility, mortality, and international migration for 237 countries or areas.

For each revision, any new, recent, and historical, information that has become available from population censuses, vital registration of births and deaths, and household surveys is considered to produce consistent time series of population estimates for each country or areas from 1950 to today

For the estimation period between 1950 and 2023, data from 1,910 censuses were considered in the present evaluation, which is 79 more than the 2022 revision. In some countries, population registers based on administrative data systems provide the necessary information. Population data from censuses or registers referring to 2019 or later were available for 114 countries or areas, representing 48 per cent of the 237 countries or areas included in this analysis (and 54 per cent of the world population). For 43 countries or areas, the most recent available population count was from the period 2014-2018, and for another 57 locations from the period 2009-2013. For the remaining 23 countries or areas, the most recent available census data were from before 2009, that is more than 15 years ago.

Retrieved on
December 2, 2024
Retrieved from
https://population.un.org/wpp/downloads/
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.
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2024). World Population Prospects 2024, Online Edition.

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

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: Life expectancy at birth”, 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, United Nations. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250729-133750/grapher/gender-ratio-in-life-expectancy-at-birth.html [online resource] (archived on July 29, 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); UN, World Population Prospects (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Human Mortality Database (2024); UN, World Population Prospects (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Life expectancy at birth – HMD – female-to-male ratio, period tables” [dataset]. Human Mortality Database, “Human Mortality Database”; United Nations, “World Population Prospects” [original data]. Retrieved August 3, 2025 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250729-133750/grapher/gender-ratio-in-life-expectancy-at-birth.html (archived on July 29, 2025).