Remaining life expectancy: why it is longer than you might think
Remaining life expectancy is the average number of further years that people of a given age would live under one year’s death rates. Because they have already survived the risks of earlier ages, their expected age at death is higher than the life expectancy at birth. It describes a group, not any one person.
Life expectancy at every age
A life table gives a life expectancy for every age, not only at birth. At age 65 it answers: if people aged 65 lived the rest of their lives with this year’s death rates, how many more years would they live on average?
By the UN life table of the world for 2023, life expectancy at birth was 73.2 years. At age 30 the remaining life expectancy was 47.5 years, at 65 it was 17.6 years and at 80 it was 8.3 years.
Why age plus remaining years is more than life expectancy at birth
Life expectancy at birth includes everyone who dies young, in infancy, childhood or early adulthood. Someone who has reached 65 has already survived all of those risks. Their age plus their remaining life expectancy is therefore higher than the life expectancy at birth of the same year. The older the age, the larger the difference.
Women and men
Remaining life expectancy differs by sex at every age. At 65, by the world’s death rates of 2023, it was 19.0 years for women and 16.0 years for men.
What the number does not say
It is an average over a whole group under one year’s death rates. It says nothing about a particular person’s health, habits or future, and death rates usually keep changing over the years that follow. Anthrotempo shows remaining life expectancy as a statistic with its year and place, never as a countdown.
See it for any country, age and year in the longevity tool.
Last updated 26 October 2026