The Causes That Take People Youngest (2024)
Homicide and overdose take Americans in their 30s and 40s, and the diseases of old age in the mid 80s. A ranking of how old each cause of death finds you.
Key findings
- What kills you says a lot about how old you are when it does. Homicide took people at a median age of just 34 in 2024, while Alzheimer's disease took them at 86, a gap of 52 years between the youngest and oldest ways to die.
- The youngest-ending causes are overwhelmingly external or behavioral: homicide (34), motor-vehicle crash (44), drug overdose (45), suicide (46).
- The oldest-ending causes are the slow diseases of aging: covid-19 (81), stroke (82), heart failure (84), alzheimer's disease (86).
- Cancer sits in between, and even varies within itself: breast cancer took people at a median 72, younger than lung cancer at 73.
Every cause of death has a characteristic age. This takes the major causes in the 2024 mortality file and computes the median age at death for each, then ranks them from the youngest-ending to the oldest. The order is a map of American mortality: violence, overdose, and crashes cut lives short in the 30s and 40s; chronic disease and dementia arrive in the 70s and 80s. Median age is the age at which half of that cause's deaths occur younger and half older. These are exact counts from the near-census of death records.
Median age at death by cause
| Median age at death (years) | Median age at death |
|---|---|
| Homicide | 34 yrs |
| Motor-vehicle crash | 44 yrs |
| Drug overdose | 45 yrs |
| Suicide | 46 yrs |
| HIV | 58 yrs |
| Chronic liver disease | 64 yrs |
| Breast cancer | 72 yrs |
| Lung cancer | 73 yrs |
| Diabetes | 73 yrs |
| Kidney disease | 78 yrs |
| Ischemic heart disease | 78 yrs |
| Flu and pneumonia | 79 yrs |
| COVID-19 | 81 yrs |
| Stroke | 82 yrs |
| Heart failure | 84 yrs |
| Alzheimer's disease | 86 yrs |
By cause
| Cause of death | Median age at death | Deaths |
|---|---|---|
| Homicide | 34 | 21,432 |
| Motor-vehicle crash | 44 | 45,339 |
| Drug overdose | 45 | 80,716 |
| Suicide | 46 | 49,098 |
| HIV | 58 | 4,640 |
| Chronic liver disease | 64 | 66,181 |
| Breast cancer | 72 | 43,967 |
| Lung cancer | 73 | 128,915 |
| Diabetes | 73 | 94,638 |
| Kidney disease | 78 | 54,039 |
| Ischemic heart disease | 78 | 346,316 |
| Flu and pneumonia | 79 | 48,312 |
| COVID-19 | 81 | 31,495 |
| Stroke | 82 | 167,256 |
| Heart failure | 84 | 92,278 |
| Alzheimer's disease | 86 | 116,076 |
Median age at death among records with a stated age. Causes are by ICD-10 underlying cause except homicide and suicide, which use the manner of death. Exact counts; no sampling margins of error.
Data Sources & Methodology
The figures on this page are computed directly from the source data below. Narrative text accompanies the figures but never generates them.
CDC/NCHS Mortality Multiple Cause-of-Death Public Use File
- Vintage:
- 2024
- Access:
- BigQuery
- Cadence:
- annual
A near-census of U.S. death records for the year, drawn from death certificates and coded to ICD-10. Each row is one death, with the underlying cause and all contributing (multiple) causes, age, sex, race and Hispanic origin, month and day of death, place and manner of death (natural, accident, suicide, homicide), marital status, education, autopsy, and disposition. It supports analysis of what Americans die of and how that varies by age and demographics.
Every U.S. death is registered on a death certificate, which NCHS compiles, codes to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), and releases as an annual public-use micro-file. Each record carries one underlying cause plus all contributing causes.
The file covers essentially all registered deaths in the data year, not a probability sample. Statistics are exact counts; there are no sampling weights and no sampling margins of error.
To protect confidentiality, the public-use file omits state and county of residence and occurrence. Analyses here are national and demographic (by cause, age, sex, race and Hispanic origin, month, manner, and place of death). State-level figures require CDC WONDER or the restricted-use file.
Causes follow ICD-10. Alongside the underlying cause, NCHS provides standard recodes (358, 113, and 39 groups) used in its publications, and the full list of entity-axis and record-axis contributing conditions.
- The public-use file has no state or county geography, so it cannot be mapped sub-nationally.
- Cause of death depends on how certifiers complete death certificates; coding conventions and ill-defined ("garbage") codes affect some categories.
- The final annual file lags roughly a year behind the data year; provisional counts (via CDC WONDER) are more timely but less detailed.
- Age is reported in several recodes; very fine demographic cross-tabulations can be thin for rare causes.
How these figures were produced
- Estimate type:
- Administrative near-census (exact counts)
- Weighting:
- None (not a weighted sample)
Suggested citation
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, 2024 Mortality Multiple Cause-of-Death Public Use File. Analysis by Matt George, itsmattgeorge.com. Retrieved 2026-10-24.