Life Expectancy Calculator

Because you keep not dying, and the average updates on that evidence. A male at birth averages ~74.8 total years, but a 65-year-old male averages ~81.9 and an 80-year-old ~87.9 — each birthday filters out the mortality that happened to others along the way, and the survivors' average rises. It's the most counterintuitive fact in the table and the one with the biggest planning consequence: retirees routinely underestimate their horizon by anchoring on at-birth figures they heard decades ago.

As a base rate, not a forecast. It's the average across everyone your age and sex — smokers and marathoners, every income and zip code — and the individual factors swamp the average: smoking alone shifts the answer by roughly a decade; exercise, weight, blood pressure, income, and family history each move years. Half of everyone beats their number, definitionally, and the distribution is wide (many people beat it by 15+ years). The honest uses: retirement savings horizons, annuity intuition, and motivation — not countdowns.

A period table asks: if today's death rates at every age were frozen forever, how long would people live? It's a clean snapshot, but mortality has improved for a century (with recent bumps), and a 25-year-old will age through decades of future medicine the snapshot can't see. Cohort projections — which model that improvement — run several years higher for the young, and the gap shrinks with age. For a 70-year-old the two nearly agree; for planning a 30-year-old's retirement, mentally add a few years.

Plan past the average, because outliving your money is the asymmetric risk: a 65-year-old male averages ~17 more years, but a quarter of that cohort reaches 90+ (women more so), and couples compound it — the odds that at least one of two 65-year-olds sees 90 are close to a coin flip. Standard practice is planning to 90–95, which is also the honest case for delaying Social Security and for annuities as longevity insurance. The average tells you the middle; you're budgeting for the tail.