Provisional estimates for 2025 put life expectancy in England at 80 years for males and 83.8 years for females. It was the first time estimated male life expectancy had reached 80 years.

That is genuine progress, but it is not the whole picture.

The latest healthy-life-expectancy figures cover the three years from 2022 to 2024. They estimate that males in England could expect 60.9 years in good health and females 61.3 years. Both figures had fallen since 2019–21. Across the United Kingdom, healthy life expectancy reached its lowest level since the current series began in 2011–13.

These figures come from different statistical series and cover different periods. They do not contradict each other. They show that a country can reduce mortality and extend average life without increasing the number of years people spend in good health.

The record is not evenly shared

The national figure contains large regional differences.

In 2025, male life expectancy was estimated at 81.1 years in London and 78.4 years in the North East. For females, the equivalent figures were 85.1 and 82.3 years.

The North East’s overall mortality rate was 25% higher than London’s.

The divide by deprivation is larger still.

In 2022–24, life expectancy for males was:

  • 73.2 years in the most deprived tenth of areas
  • 83.6 years in the least deprived tenth

For females, it was:

  • 78.3 years in the most deprived areas
  • 86.4 years in the least deprived

That is a difference of more than ten years for males and eight years for females.

Area deprivation is not the same as personal income or wealth. People with different circumstances live within the same neighbourhoods, and these figures cannot predict how long one individual will live.

They do show a strong population-level relationship between living conditions, deprivation and mortality.

The gap in good health is about twenty years

Healthy life expectancy estimates how many years a person would spend in good self-reported health if current patterns of mortality and health continued.

It does not mean that someone remains healthy until a particular birthday and then becomes ill. Healthy and unhealthy periods can occur throughout life.

In England’s most deprived areas, healthy life expectancy in 2022–24 was:

  • 49.8 years for males
  • 48.2 years for females

In the least deprived areas, it was:

  • 69.2 years for males
  • 68.5 years for females

The direct difference between the two groups was 19.4 years for males and 20.3 years for females.

The Office for National Statistics also calculates a slope index of inequality, which measures the gradient across all ten deprivation groups and weights them by population. Using that measure, the estimated inequality was 19.3 years for males and 20.1 years for females.

People in the most deprived areas therefore face shorter average lives and substantially fewer years in good health.

Money and security buy distance from danger

The deprivation figures do not measure each resident’s personal wealth. Wider evidence nevertheless shows why income and material security affect health.

The World Health Organization describes the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age — and their access to power, money and resources — as major causes of health inequality. Health generally worsens at each step down the social and economic scale.

Wealth does not guarantee good health. It provides more protection against the conditions that damage it.

A person with sufficient money has a better chance of living in a warm and secure home, leaving dangerous work, obtaining adequate food and taking time away from work when ill. They can travel to appointments, pay for help and absorb an unexpected loss of income without immediately risking rent arrears or homelessness.

Someone without those protections may understand the health risk and still be unable to avoid it.

They may remain in a damp home because moving is unaffordable. They may work through illness because statutory sick pay will not cover essential bills. They may delay treatment because an appointment means lost wages, transport costs or care that cannot be arranged.

They may also return to work before recovering because rest has become financially impossible.

Wealth does not merely influence personal choices. It determines which choices are realistically available and how damaging a crisis is allowed to become.

Why this is a human-rights issue

Human rights do not guarantee identical health or an equal lifespan for every person.

They establish that people have equal worth and should have access to the basic conditions needed for a safe and dignified life.

The United Kingdom is a party to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Its protections include rights relating to health, housing, food, social security and safe working conditions.

The right to health is not confined to hospitals and medical treatment. It depends on the conditions in which people live and work, including adequate food, housing, sanitation and protection from avoidable environmental and occupational harm.

The unfairness is not that people use their money to protect themselves and their families. It is that protections necessary for health and dignity depend so heavily on the ability to pay.

A warm home should not function as a private medical treatment. Safe work should not be available only to people with enough bargaining power to refuse dangerous conditions. Recovery should not depend on whether someone can survive a missing wage.

This does not mean that every health inequality automatically breaches the Human Rights Act. The covenant has not generally been incorporated into UK domestic law and cannot normally be enforced directly through British courts in the same way as rights contained in the Human Rights Act.

It remains binding on the United Kingdom in international law and provides a standard against which public policy can be judged.

Government cannot prevent every illness or early death. It can be required to confront avoidable conditions that expose some communities to greater harm, particularly when the causes are known and public policy can reduce them.

The rights problem is not that outcomes differ. It is that access to safety, control and recovery remains distributed according to wealth even where the resulting harm is preventable.

The same inequality shapes pension policy

The State Pension age applies nationally, despite an inequality of about twenty years in healthy life expectancy at birth.

That statistic does not tell us who will be healthy when they reach pension age. It does show how unequal the lifetime conditions surrounding retirement are.

People with private pensions, property or savings may be able to leave work when their health deteriorates. Others must continue working, rely on working-age benefits or survive on an inadequate income until they qualify for the State Pension.

The legal pension age may be the same. The ability to endure the wait is not.

Companion investigation

Britain Uses the Longer Lives of the Wealthy to Make Everyone Wait Longer for a Pension

That investigation examines what happens when improvements concentrated among healthier and more prosperous groups are treated as a universal justification for raising the pension age.

The government has made a promise it cannot yet be held to properly

The government’s 10 Year Health Plan says its overall goal is to halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions while increasing healthy life expectancy for everyone.

The plan does not clearly state a deadline for that target.

Although it is contained within a ten-year plan, it does not expressly say that the gap must be halved by 2035. Nor does it define exactly which geographical areas will represent the richest and poorest “regions”.

The government also says it will work with the Office for National Statistics and other experts to develop a new set of delivery indicators. The measurement system therefore remains unfinished.

Before delivery can be tested properly, government must publish:

  • the geographical units being compared;
  • the statistical baseline;
  • the deadline;
  • the indicators used to measure progress;
  • and the frequency with which results will be reported.

The existing deprivation figures provide an important baseline, but they compare small areas divided into ten deprivation groups. They may not be the same measure the government eventually chooses for its promise about richer and poorer regions.

Until the government defines the target, a statement that sounds measurable remains difficult to verify.

The present evidence shows that delivery has not yet been established.

The national figure describes no single life

National life expectancy is useful. It can track mortality over time and allow comparison between populations.

It can also combine lives lived under radically different conditions.

The same national figure includes people with secure homes, safe work, savings and the freedom to recover from illness, alongside people facing dangerous work, poor housing, insecure income and no realistic route out.

Combining those experiences produces one number. It does not make the experiences equal.

England’s record life expectancy should be recognised. Lower mortality and longer average lives matter.

But a national record cannot, on its own, show whether progress has been shared.

That requires different questions:

Who gained the additional years?

Where do they live?

How many of those years are spent in good health?

And how much does the answer still depend on what a person can afford?

What the figures show

These statistics describe population-level patterns, not individual destinies.

Healthy life expectancy combines mortality data with self-reported health. The latest figures are classified as official statistics in development because declining Annual Population Survey sample sizes have increased uncertainty. Not every estimated change between periods or regions will be statistically significant.

That uncertainty does not remove the central finding: England has large and persistent inequalities in both total life expectancy and the number of years people can expect to spend in good health.