EU Life Expectancy Reaches 81.5 Years in 2023
A newborn EU-citizen is now expected to live well into the 22nd century
According to provisional estimates from Eurostat1, the average life expectancy for an EU citizen reached 81.5 years in 2023. This marks a recovery and improvement from the pre-pandemic level of 81.3 years in 2019.
Another way to look at the estimated life expectancy is that a newborn EU citizen in 2023 will live until the year 2104. However, it’s important to note that the life expectancy estimates assumes current mortality rates stay the same for throughout the lifetime of the 2023 birth cohort2.
Which EU Countries Have the Highest and Lowest Life Expectancy?
Eurostat's data shows significant variation among the EU27 countries:
Highest: Spain, with a life expectancy of 84 years, followed closely by Italy (83.8 years) and Malta (83.6 years).
Lowest: Bulgaria, at 75.8 years, followed by Latvia (75.9 years) and Romania (76.6 years).
A newborn in Spain is thus expected to live over 8 years longer than newborn in Bulgaria.
While both Bulgaria and Romania are at the lower end, they are among the countries with the largest gains in life expectancy since 2019. On the other hand, Finland and Austria, despite their relatively high life expectancy levels, recorded the largest decreases since 2019.
If we take a longer perspective, Estonia stands out with the most significant increase, adding over 7 years to its life expectancy since 2002, the first year for which data for all EU countries is available.
Further reading
One of the main goals of this Substack is to provide practical insights on data trends and useful recommendations for open data sources and visualisation tools.
Data source
The data used in this article is published by Eurostat. The 2023 provisional estimates where published in May 2024. You can explore the dataset further in the Eurostat Data Browser. Note that Eurostat also publish data for several non-EU countries.
Visualisation tool
The charts and tables used in this post are made with Datawrapper.
The data in the charts used in this article can be downloaded directly from the link below the charts by pressing “Get the data.” This can be helpful if you want to create your own visualisations from this dataset.
If you find it helpful to reuse these charts, I have made them available on Datawrapper River, where you can find a “Reuse this chart” button using the links below. Doing that will import the chart directly into your Datawrapper account (which is free to set up). In this way, you can, for example, try out different ways to visualise the data.
Datawrapper River links:
Eurostat (2024) ‘EU life expectancy estimated at 81.5 years in 2023’, Eurostat News, 3 May. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240503-2 (Accessed: 14 January 2025).
Read more in the section ‘Methodological notes’ in the above link.