Health statistics: what the data actually shows

What is the average life expectancy?

In the US, 79.0 years at birth in 2024, which finally put the country back above where it stood before the pandemic. Life expectancy dropped from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.4 in 2021, the lowest since 1996 and one of the steepest short-term falls since the Second World War, before climbing back in the CDC's figures for the years that followed.

Women outlive men by 4.9 years: 81.4 against 76.5 at birth in 2024. The gap grew during the pandemic, partly because more men died of COVID-19 and partly because the overdose deaths of the same years fell so heavily on men.

Against other rich countries the US does badly. In WHO's 2021 estimates, the latest year it publishes for every country, Japan led at 84.5 years, with Australia at 83.1, Germany at 80.5 and the United Kingdom at 80.1, while the US stood at 76.4. The life expectancy calculator gives a projection for your own age and health, and the biological age calculator shows how much of that is in your hands, and the weekends remaining calculator turns the same life tables into a count of weekends.

How much sleep does the average person get?

Just under seven hours, and falling. Gallup has asked Americans about their sleep since 1942, when the average ran more than an hour longer, and its 2013 poll put it at 6.8 hours, just below the 7 to 9 hours the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for adults. By Gallup's 2023 poll, 20% of adults said they got five hours or less, against 3% in 1942.

The CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System finds 35% of American adults regularly sleeping less than seven hours. Short sleep goes with higher rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and weaker immune function, and after a decade of public health campaigns the share of adults getting enough hasn't moved.

Age changes the picture. In the CDC's 2014 survey, 32% of 18 to 24 year olds slept less than seven hours, rising to 38% of 25 to 44 year olds, while the over-65s did best at 26%, although older adults also nap more in the day, which makes them hard to compare with anyone else. The sleep debt calculator measures what you're getting against what you personally need rather than against a single national number.

What is a normal resting heart rate?

Anywhere from 60 to 100 beats a minute, by the American Heart Association's definition, and that width is the point: it covers a very varied population. Fit people and athletes routinely sit below 60, which has a medical name, bradycardia, and is entirely normal in a fit person with no symptoms.

The actual American average, from CDC NHANES exams of healthy people in 1999 to 2008, is 72 beats a minute in adulthood, 74 for women and 71 for men, near the middle of the range. In fit people it tends to drift down with age as the heart gets more efficient, and in sedentary people it tends to drift up as the rest of the cardiovascular system wears.

Persistently above 100 is tachycardia and worth a doctor's look. There's growing evidence that the lower half of the normal range, 60 to 70, goes with lower long-term cardiovascular mortality than 80 to 100, so "normal" isn't all one thing. The resting heart rate calculator gives your percentile, and the fitness age calculator puts it in the wider fitness picture.

What is normal blood pressure?

Below 120 over 80, and by that definition nearly half of American adults don't have it. In 2017 the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association lowered the line for hypertension from 140/90 to 130/80, which on the same survey data took the share of American adults counted as hypertensive from 31.9% to 45.6%. The people didn't change; the line did.

The 2017 categories run: normal below 120/80, elevated at 120 to 129 systolic with diastolic under 80, Stage 1 hypertension at 130 to 139 over 80 to 89, and Stage 2 at 140 or above over 90 or above. Above 180/120 is a crisis and needs immediate care. Most people with high blood pressure feel nothing, which is why it gets called a silent condition and why it goes untreated.

Of the 119.9 million American adults the CDC counts as hypertensive on its 2017 to March 2020 data, only 22.5% have it under control with medication or lifestyle changes. The blood pressure calculator tells you which category your readings fall into and how many people share it.

What is the average BMI?

Just under 30, the line between overweight and obese. The CDC's NHANES exams for 2015 to 2018 put mean adult BMI at 29.4 for men and 29.8 for women. Obesity reached 41.9% of American adults in 2017 to March 2020, up from 30.5% in 1999 to 2000, and the August 2021 to August 2023 cycle puts it at 40.3%, with severe obesity at 9.4%.

In 2017 to March 2020 the full distribution ran: 27.4% of adults at a healthy or underweight BMI (below 25), 30.7% overweight (25 to 29.9) and 41.9% obese (30 or above), with severe obesity (BMI 40 or above) at about 9.2%. So a BMI of 24 puts you in the slimmest quarter of the country, which few people with a BMI of 24 realise.

Obesity is highest in middle age, 40 to 59, and differs a lot by race, ethnicity and state, ranging from about 24% to over 40% depending on where you look. The healthy weight calculator shows where your BMI sits in the population, the body fat percentage calculator gets past BMI's blindness to muscle, and for anyone on a GLP-1 drug the weight loss drug cost calculator compares monthly prices across the main UK and US providers.

What is a normal menstrual cycle?

Anything from 21 to 35 days, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The 28-day cycle everyone quotes is an average, not a standard, and most people don't have one. Cycles vary between people and, within one person, from month to month, and none of that on its own is a problem.

Bleeding for 3 to 7 days is normal. Cycle length also shifts across a lifetime: irregular in the first years after periods start and again in the run-up to menopause, most regular from the late twenties to the mid-thirties, then shorter and less predictable from the late thirties as ovarian reserve falls.

The very large datasets from tracking apps, Clue and the Apple Women's Health Study, back up the clinical guidance and add one finding of their own: cycle length varies more between two people than it does for one person over time, so your own history is a better guide than any average. Is my period normal compares your cycle data with the population, and the period calculator predicts your next dates from your own pattern.

What is the average age of menopause?

Fifty-one, in both the US and the UK. Menopause is dated to twelve months without a period, absent surgery or medical cause, and the NHS and the North American Menopause Society put the normal range at 45 to 55. Before 40 it's classed as premature ovarian insufficiency, which affects about 1% of women.

Perimenopause, the run-up, usually starts 4 to 8 years before the final period and brings irregular cycles, swinging hormones and the first hot flushes. A lot of women are in it from their mid-forties without anyone, including their doctor, naming what's happening.

Removing both ovaries brings menopause on at any age, and usually more abruptly than the natural version; chemotherapy and pelvic radiotherapy can do the same. The menopause stage calculator places you on the timeline, and the perimenopause quiz checks whether your symptoms fit the pattern.

How much caffeine does the average person consume?

About 165mg a day for Americans who drink caffeinated beverages, all ages together, a little under two ordinary 8-ounce cups of brewed coffee, in a seven-day drink diary study of 37,602 people by Mitchell et al. (2014). In the same study, 85% of the US population had at least one caffeinated drink a day, and caffeine is the most widely used psychoactive drug on earth. The FDA's ceiling for healthy adults is 400mg a day; above that come anxiety, poor sleep and a faster heart, and at very high doses, rarely, an irregular one.

How fast you clear it is mostly down to one liver enzyme, CYP1A2, and people differ a lot. Caffeine's half-life runs from 3 to 7 hours in most adults, shorter in heavy smokers and longer in pregnancy or on certain medicines. For a slow metaboliser a 3pm coffee is still working at bedtime, and it disturbs sleep even when you don't feel awake.

Intake peaks at 226mg a day among 50 to 64 year olds. Coffee is the main source at every age, soft drinks and tea supply a bigger share for under-18s, and no more than 10% of any age group drinks energy drinks. The caffeine clearance calculator estimates how much is still in you at any hour from what you drank and when.

How common are digestive conditions?

Far more common than the number of diagnoses suggests. The Rome Foundation, which writes the diagnostic criteria for functional gut disorders, surveyed 73,076 adults in 33 countries and found 40.3% of internet respondents and 20.7% of those interviewed at home met the criteria for at least one. Irritable bowel syndrome came out at 4.1% on the current Rome IV criteria and 10.1% on the older Rome III ones, so the 10 to 15% figure you often see belongs to the looser definition.

Reflux disease troubles about 20% of people in Western countries at least weekly, which makes it one of the commonest diagnoses in general practice. Functional dyspepsia, chronic indigestion with nothing structural behind it, affects another 10 to 15%. Chronic constipation, fewer than three bowel movements a week with other symptoms, affects about 14% of adults. Coeliac disease, an autoimmune reaction to gluten, affects about 1%, and a good share of them don't know.

The symptoms overlap heavily between conditions, and many people with a functional gut disorder also live with anxiety or depression. Do I have IBS checks your symptoms against the IBS profile, and the bloating symptom checker maps a wider set of symptoms to the conditions they usually belong to.

What are average cancer survival rates?

About 70% of people diagnosed with cancer are alive five years later, across all types combined, 70.5% for diagnoses in 2016 to 2022 on the National Cancer Institute's SEER figures, up from 49% for people diagnosed in the mid-1970s. Earlier detection, better surgery, better chemotherapy, targeted drugs and immunotherapy all contributed. The figure is relative survival, meaning the chance of surviving five years compared with someone the same age who doesn't have cancer.

The average hides an enormous range. Thyroid cancer has a 98% five-year survival rate and early melanoma is nearly as good; pancreatic cancer (about 14%) and glioblastoma (about 7%) are still among the worst diagnoses in medicine. For most solid tumours, stage at diagnosis matters more than anything, with early localised disease surviving two to four times as often as disease that has spread. Around 5 to 10% of cancers come from inherited mutations; the rest come from environment, lifestyle and plain chance in dividing cells.

Both how often cancer strikes and how often people survive it vary with age, sex, race and place. The cancer survival rates page goes through the numbers cancer by cancer. For men under 35 the one to know is testicular cancer, and the testicular asymmetry page sets out which changes need a GP and which are ordinary anatomy.

How common is vitamin deficiency?

It depends heavily on where the cut-off sits, and vitamin D shows it best. NHANES 2005 to 2006 put 41.6% of American adults at or below 20 ng/mL of 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the line that study used, but the CDC's later analysis of 2011 to 2014 found 5% of Americans at risk of deficiency, below 12 ng/mL, and another 18% at risk of inadequacy, 12 to 20 ng/mL. Low levels are commoner in Black and Hispanic Americans and in people with obesity. Vitamin D matters for bones, immunity and the heart, so that's a deficiency with consequences at population scale.

Iron is the commonest deficiency in the world. In the US it affects about 10% of women of reproductive age and 15 to 20% of pregnant women, bringing fatigue, foggy thinking and anaemia, and in pregnancy a higher risk of a poor birth outcome. Men and women past menopause are far less often affected.

Vitamin B12 deficiency affects about 6% of adults aged 60 and over in large US and UK surveys, and close to 20% of older adults have marginal levels, because B12 comes almost entirely from animal foods, so vegetarians and vegans run short, and because older stomachs make less acid and absorb it less well. The vitamin deficiency quiz weighs your own risk, and the supplement safe dose checker shows how much is too much.