Life Expectancy and Retirement Statistics (2026)

US life expectancy at birth reached a record 79.0 years in 2024, up 0.6 year from 78.4 in 2023, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. Men can expect 76.5 years and women 81.4, and the overall death rate fell almost 4% to 722.1 per 100,000 (see the table below).

For retirement planning, the more relevant number is life expectancy at age 65, which was 19.7 years in 2024. That means an average 65-year-old is expected to live to about 84.7, with women (20.8 more years) outliving men (18.4) by well over two years at that age.

The long arc is one of steady gains. US life expectancy at birth rose from about 68 years in 1950 to 73.7 by 1980, 76.8 by 2000, and a pre-pandemic peak of 78.8 in 2019 (see the chart and table below). Most of the recent gains have come at older ages as heart-disease deaths fell.

The pandemic caused a sharp reversal: life expectancy dropped to 76.4 in 2021, erasing roughly two decades of progress in a single stretch. The 2023 and 2024 rebounds to 78.4 and then 79.0 finally pushed past the old record, but the interruption was a reminder that the trend is not guaranteed.

Women live meaningfully longer than men. At birth the gap in 2024 was about 4.9 years (81.4 vs 76.5), and even at age 65 women can expect 20.8 more years to men's 18.4. This gap narrowed slightly in 2024 because male life expectancy rose faster (up 0.7 year vs 0.3 for women).

The gap has real financial consequences: married women are statistically likely to outlive their husbands and spend years as a sole survivor. Research also shows women spend more of their later years with disability, so longer life does not always mean more healthy years (see the health-span section below).

At 65, the average American has 19.7 more years ahead, but an average is a poor planning target because it means roughly half of people outlive it. A 65-year-old woman is expected to reach about 85.8 and a man about 83.4 (see the chart below), and a large share live well into their 90s.

Because retirement can last far longer than the average, advisers typically plan to a percentile well beyond the median, often age 90 or 95. Planning only to average life expectancy leaves a coin-flip risk of running short of money in the years you are least able to earn.

Combine early retirement with long life and the math is striking. With the median American retiring around age 62 and living into the mid-80s, a typical retirement runs about 20 to 23 years, and planning horizons of 30 years or more are common for couples.

That is far longer than most people intuitively budget for. A 30-year retirement means your savings must survive multiple market cycles, several recessions, and decades of inflation, which is why the mix between spending down and staying invested is one of the highest-stakes decisions in retirement.

Longevity risk is the chance you live longer than your money lasts, and it is largest for couples. A 65-year-old couple has a joint life expectancy of about 89, and there is roughly a 53% chance at least one spouse lives past 90 and about an 18% chance one reaches 95 (see the table below).

For individuals the odds are lower but still material: a single woman at 65 has about a one-in-three chance of reaching 90 and a single man about one-in-four. These tail probabilities, not the average, are what a sound plan has to survive, because outliving your assets is a risk you cannot recover from.

People consistently retire earlier than they plan to. In the 2025 EBRI Retirement Confidence Survey, the median worker expected to retire at 65, but the median retiree had actually stopped at 62, a gap that has persisted for decades (see the table below).

The mismatch cuts both ways: 30% of workers expect to work to 70 or beyond (or never retire), yet only 9% of retirees actually did, while 27% of retirees left before 60 versus just 12% who planned to. Health problems, layoffs, and caregiving often force the timeline, so plans built on working longer are fragile.

Life expectancy varies enormously by group. In 2023, the latest year with a full breakdown, it ranged from 70.1 years for American Indian and Alaska Native people and 74.0 for Black Americans to 78.4 for White, 81.3 for Hispanic, and 85.2 for Asian Americans, a spread of about 15 years (see the chart and table below).

The gaps have narrowed somewhat as the hardest-hit groups recovered fastest from the pandemic: AIAN life expectancy jumped 2.3 years from 2022 to 2023, and Black life expectancy rose 1.2 years. Still, the differences remain wide and shape how long different Americans should expect their retirement savings to last.

Money buys years of life. The landmark Chetty et al. study in JAMA found the richest 1% of American men live about 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1%, and for women the gap is 10.1 years (see the table below). Higher-income people not only live longer but have seen faster gains.

The National Academies found the male life-expectancy gap at age 50 between the top and bottom income quintiles widened from 5.1 years for the 1930 birth cohort to 12.7 years for the 1960 cohort. This is central to Social Security debates, because raising the retirement age asks lower-income workers, who gained the least longevity, to give up proportionally more.

Life expectancy measures years lived, not years lived in good health, and the two are diverging, especially for women. Research shows the share of remaining years a 65-year-old man can expect to spend active rose to about 81%, while for women it held near 70%, so women live longer but spend more late years with disability.

The gap between total lifespan and healthy lifespan matters for money as much as for wellbeing: years spent with limitations often carry the highest costs, from in-home help to long-term care. Planning for longevity has to budget for expensive later years, not just more of them.

Reaching 100 is becoming less rare. Pew Research estimates about 101,000 Americans were age 100 or older in 2024, and that number is projected to more than quadruple to roughly 422,000 by 2054, though centenarians would still be only about 0.1% of the population.

The group skews heavily female: about 78% of today's centenarians are women. As very long lives become more common, the planning question shifts from whether you might live a long time to how confidently your income can stretch across a retirement that could plausibly last 35 years or more.

Longevity is often called the risk that multiplies all others. The longer you live, the more years inflation compounds against your savings, the more market downturns you must ride through, and the more likely you are to face major health or long-term-care costs late in life.

This is why simply saving a fixed lump sum is not enough. A 30-year horizon means money left entirely in cash steadily loses purchasing power, while an all-stock portfolio may be too volatile for near-term spending. The core challenge of retirement is turning a finite pool of savings into income that reliably outlasts an uncertain lifespan.

Plan for a long life, not an average one. Because roughly half of 65-year-olds outlive the average and couples very often see 90-plus, building a plan to age 90 or 95 is prudent rather than pessimistic. That argues for keeping a growth engine in the portfolio well into retirement rather than shifting entirely to cash and bonds at 65.

A common framework keeps a few years of spending in safe assets to ride out downturns while the rest stays invested for the decades still ahead, since stocks have historically returned about 7% a year after inflation. Guaranteed lifetime income sources, from delaying Social Security to annuitizing part of savings, directly hedge the risk of living longer than expected. Walnut is a tracking and analysis tool, not an investment adviser, and none of this is individualized advice.