Yorick › Life expectancy by country
Life expectancy by country: how much of your date is your address?
The spread across the 234 countries and territories in the table is about thirty years. The useful question is how much of it still applies to someone who has already reached today.
Your country is question three of nineteen. The result is free.
The data
Life expectancy at birth, by sex
These are the figures bundled inside the app, drawn from United Nations World Population Prospects 2024 projections for 2026, covering 234 countries and territories.
| Country or territory | Men | Women | Rank of 234 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monaco | 84.8 | 88.8 | 1 |
| San Marino | 84.5 | 87.4 | 2 |
| Hong Kong | 83.2 | 88.5 | 3 |
| Japan | 82.1 | 88.2 | 4 |
| Switzerland | 82.5 | 86.2 | 9 |
| Australia | 82.6 | 86.1 | 10 |
| France | 80.9 | 86.4 | 20 |
| Canada | 80.9 | 85.2 | 25 |
| Germany | 79.6 | 84.1 | 45 |
| United Kingdom | 79.9 | 83.6 | 47 |
| United States | 77.4 | 82.2 | 61 |
| Brazil | 73.3 | 79.5 | 113 |
| India | 71.2 | 74.4 | 149 |
| Lesotho | 55.9 | 61.3 | 230 |
| Chad | 53.7 | 57.6 | 233 |
| Nigeria | 54.6 | 55.3 | 234 |
Why a raw country figure is the wrong number for you
Life expectancy at birth is a statement about newborns. It is dragged down heavily by deaths that happen early, and if you are reading this you have already survived every one of those. Handing an adult the at birth figure for their country and calling it their life expectancy overstates the gap by a wide margin.
Yorick treats the country as a level adjustment rather than as the answer. It measures how far your country sits from the United States reference table at birth, then fades that difference in proportion to how much life you have left. At 30 almost the whole difference still applies. At 70 only a fraction does, because survivors of very different countries converge as they age.
This is also why the country question cannot be skipped. Start every user on a United States table and every non American gets a systematically wrong baseline before a single lifestyle question has been asked.
The comparison screen, and its honest caption
Yorick Pro includes a screen that reruns your entire estimate for every one of the 234 entries and sorts the results, so you can see the same life lived elsewhere. It swaps only the country baseline and never your habits, and it says so on the screen: people there live longer, which is not the same as moving being a cure. Emigrating as an adult does not hand you the childhood mortality, the healthcare history or the air quality of the place you moved to.
What the screen is genuinely good for is proportion. Seeing that your country costs or gains you three years, while your smoking answer costs ten, settles an argument about where your attention belongs.
Free result. The country comparison is part of Pro, $4.99 once.
Where these numbers come from
The country table inside the app is compiled from United Nations Population Division estimates, World Population Prospects 2024, medium variant, projected to the calendar year 2026, giving life expectancy at birth by sex for 234 countries and territories. The age structure of the underlying curve comes from the US Social Security Administration period life table for 2022, which is where the figures of 74.7 years for a newborn boy and 80.2 for a newborn girl come from.
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