The Marriage Mortality Gap (2024)
Never-married adults die years younger than married ones and far more often by external causes. An association, not a prescription.
Key findings
- Among adults who died in 2024, the never-married died at a median age of 60, while the married died at 76, a gap of 16 years.
- The never-married also died far more often by external causes: 24.1% of their deaths were an accident, suicide, or homicide, versus 6.4% among the married.
- Suicide tracks the same divide, at 4.3% of never-married deaths versus 1.4% of married deaths.
- This describes who dies, not cause and effect: married people who die are, on average, older, and marriage is intertwined with age, income, and health. Widowed decedents are the oldest of all (median 87) simply because widowhood comes late in life.
Marital status shows up starkly in the mortality record. This takes every 2024 death of an adult and compares, by marital status, the median age at death and the share of deaths from external causes (accident, suicide, homicide). The never-married and divorced die younger and more violently than the married; the widowed die oldest, by the nature of widowhood. These are associations in who dies, not evidence that marriage itself extends life, because marital status is bound up with age, income, and health. These are exact counts from the near-census of death records.
Age at death by marital status, 2024
Median age at death by marital status
| Category | Median age at death |
|---|---|
| Never married | 60 yrs |
| Divorced | 72 yrs |
| Married | 76 yrs |
| Widowed | 87 yrs |
By marital status
| Marital status | Median age at death | External-cause deaths | Suicide | Adult deaths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Never married | 60 | 24.1% | 4.3% | 436,384 |
| Divorced | 72 | 9.2% | 1.8% | 553,818 |
| Married | 76 | 6.4% | 1.4% | 1,093,308 |
| Widowed | 87 | 3.7% | 0.3% | 931,804 |
Adults 18 and older with a stated age. External-cause share is accidents, suicides, and homicides. Associations only, not causal. 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.