The Deadliest Day of the Week (2024)
Overall deaths barely move day to day, but homicides spike on weekends and suicides spike on Mondays. Two opposite weekly rhythms.
Key findings
- The deadliest day depends on how you die. Across all 3,082,196 deaths with a known day, Monday saw the most (449,076) and Sunday the fewest (432,166), a modest 3.9% spread.
- Homicides spike on weekends: Sunday had the most (3,646), about 36.4% above the Wednesday low (2,674). Sunday totals include violence after midnight on Saturday night.
- Suicides run the opposite way, peaking at the start of the week: Monday had the most (7,696), 18.5% above the Saturday low (6,495).
- So weekends are deadliest for violence between people, while Monday is deadliest for violence against oneself, and for deaths overall.
Death does not fall evenly across the week, and the rhythm differs by cause. This counts every U.S. death in 2024 by the day of the week it occurred, then splits out homicides and suicides, which follow strikingly different weekly patterns. Overall mortality barely moves day to day, but the external causes, the ones tied to behavior and circumstance, swing hard: violence toward others clusters on weekends, while suicide clusters on Mondays. These are exact counts from the near-census of death records.
Deadliest day by cause, 2024
All deaths by day of week
| Category | Deaths |
|---|---|
| Sunday | 432,166 |
| Monday | 449,076 |
| Tuesday | 445,935 |
| Wednesday | 436,363 |
| Thursday | 437,467 |
| Friday | 442,607 |
| Saturday | 438,582 |
Homicide and suicide follow opposite weekly rhythms
| Category | Homicides | Suicides |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday | 3,646 | 6,535 |
| Monday | 3,025 | 7,696 |
| Tuesday | 2,847 | 7,458 |
| Wednesday | 2,674 | 7,225 |
| Thursday | 2,775 | 6,737 |
| Friday | 2,882 | 6,924 |
| Saturday | 3,575 | 6,495 |
By day of week
| Day | All deaths | Homicides | Suicides |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday | 432,166 | 3,646 | 6,535 |
| Monday | 449,076 | 3,025 | 7,696 |
| Tuesday | 445,935 | 2,847 | 7,458 |
| Wednesday | 436,363 | 2,674 | 7,225 |
| Thursday | 437,467 | 2,775 | 6,737 |
| Friday | 442,607 | 2,882 | 6,924 |
| Saturday | 438,582 | 3,575 | 6,495 |
Day of week is the day the death occurred. 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.