HONOLULU, Hawaii: A report on life expectancy released by the National Center for Health Statistics has ranked life expectancy in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, using state-specific death and population figures from 2019.
According to the report, the top-ranked state for life expectancy in 2019 was Hawaii, at 80.9 years, while Mississippi came in last with life expectancy at 74.4 years.
After Hawaii, California, New York, Minnesota and Massachusetts made up the top five states for the highest life expectancies at birth overall for males and females in 2019. Southern states, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and West Virginia, filled the bottom five places.
In 2019, overall life expectancy at birth for the entire U.S. was 78.8, a 0.1-year increase from the previous year, the report revealed.
The 2019 figures were gathered before the COVID-19 pandemic, which took a toll on the nation’s average life expectancy, but a CDC report in July estimated that U.S. life expectancy fell by a year-and-a-half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II. The decline among men was even greater, at 2 years.
The 2019 report also highlighted notable differences when expectancies were broken down by genders, with life expectancy being consistently higher among women.
“The difference in life expectancy between the sexes in the U.S. was 5.1 years in 2019, ranging from a high of 6.4 years in Mississippi to a low of 3.5 years in Utah. With a few exceptions, the states with the largest sex differences are those with lower life expectancy at birth, while the smallest sex differences are found mostly among states with higher life expectancy,” the report stated.
The report also ranked states by life expectancy at age 65. Hawaii again ranked first among the population overall, as well as for specific male and female populations, at 21.2, 19.4 and 22.9 years.
Mississippi again ranked last, having the lowest life expectancy for the total population and just for males at age 65.
