Where Americans Die (2024)
More Americans now die at home than in a hospital, and the mix flips by cause, from hospice for cancer to nursing homes for dementia.
Key findings
- Most people picture a hospital, but in 2024 more Americans died at home (34.2%) than in a hospital (28.8%). Nursing homes and long-term care accounted for 17.0%, and hospice facilities 6.9%.
- Cancer deaths look very different: 11.9% happened in a hospice facility and 45.7% at home, reflecting planned end-of-life care, versus just 25.5% in a hospital.
- Sudden causes stay out of the hospital for the opposite reason. Ischemic heart disease killed 41.5% of its victims at home, often before they could reach care.
- Alzheimer's deaths concentrate where its patients live: 46.5% occurred in a nursing home or long-term care facility, far above the 17.0% overall.
Where do Americans actually die? This counts every 2024 death by the place it occurred, then compares three causes with very different trajectories. The headline upends the hospital assumption: home is now the single most common place of death. But the mix flips by cause, from the planned hospice deaths of cancer to the sudden at-home deaths of heart disease to the long institutional decline of dementia. These are exact counts from the near-census of death records.
Place of death, 2024
Where Americans die, all causes
| Category | Share of deaths |
|---|---|
| Home | 34.2% |
| Hospital | 28.8% |
| Nursing / LTC | 17% |
| Other | 7.2% |
| Hospice | 6.9% |
| ER / outpatient | 5.8% |
Place of death by cause
| Cause | Home | Hospital | Hospice | Nursing / LTC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All causes | 34.2% | 28.8% | 6.9% | 17.0% |
| Cancer | 45.7% | 25.5% | 11.9% | 11.0% |
| Ischemic heart disease | 41.5% | 20.8% | 3.7% | 15.8% |
| Alzheimer's disease | 32.9% | 4.3% | 6.1% | 46.5% |
Shares are of deaths with a known place of death. Cancer is ICD-10 C00 to C97; ischemic heart disease I20 to I25. 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.