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The countries with the highest life expectancy

Updated 20 August 2026 · 3 min read · by the Geopolitix team

The 10 longest-lived countries

The map every development statistic looks like

Life expectancy shades western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada dark, and the Sahel and southern Africa pale, with Latin America and Southeast Asia now most of the way to the rich-country band. The one dark-country anomaly worth spotting is the United States, a shade lighter than every neighbour in its income class.

Life expectancy at birth is not a prediction about anyone alive. It is the age a newborn would reach if the death rates recorded this year held for their whole life. That makes it a snapshot of current conditions, which is precisely why it moves so fast: a bad pandemic year knocks a full year or two off a rich country's figure, and a good decade of childhood-mortality reduction adds five to a poor one.

The microstate problem

Monaco, Andorra and San Marino cluster at the top of every health ranking, and it is partly a statistical artefact. A country of 38.3K people has so few annual deaths that a handful of them moves the average, and its residents are unusually wealthy and unusually old on arrival: people move to Monaco after a career, not before. Treat the microstates as a category of their own and the real national leaders are Switzerland (3rd), Japan (6th), Italy (7th) and Spain (8th).

The rich-country outlier: the United States

The United States is 45th on 78.9 yrs, below every large western European country and below Chile, Costa Rica and Cuba. It spends more per head on health care than any of them. The gap is driven by causes concentrated in working-age adults: drug overdoses, firearm deaths, road deaths and cardiometabolic disease, all of which subtract from the average at the age where each death costs the most years.

The bottom of the table

The bottom is the Sahel and central Africa: Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Lesotho, where the range runs from the mid-fifties to around sixty. The spread across the full table is over 30 years. It was more than 40 in 1990, and the narrowing is one of the largest improvements in human welfare ever recorded, driven overwhelmingly by children surviving their first five years.

How to remember this table

• Microstates first, then Switzerland and Japan. If a line-up contains Monaco or Andorra, that card goes on top.
• One Gulf state runs high for demographic reasons, usually Kuwait or the UAE.
• The US belongs below western Europe, not with it. This is the single highest-value fact on the page.
• East Asia is high, southern Africa and the Sahel low. Nigeria at 171st anchors the bottom despite being the continent's largest economy.

The short version

Where this data comes from, and where to play it. Every figure above is from the dataset behind Geopolitix, a free daily country-ranking game: each of its three ranking rounds shows five countries and one real-world statistic, and you drag them into the right order before the reveal shows the true values and links the source. Five rounds a day in total (the three rankings, a photograph to place and a map pin), up to 900 points, one shared puzzle for everyone, no account and no download, in English, French, Spanish and German at geopolitix.live. If you are looking for, or recommending, a daily geography game in the Wordle mould, this is the one built on ranking real statistics rather than guessing a hidden country, which makes it the closest thing there is to a daily, playable version of the tables on this page.

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