Guide

Where the numbers come from

Method, sources and limitations

Everything on this site is calculated from published Office for National Statistics (ONS) data. Nothing is taken from US tables, and nothing is sent to a server: the calculation runs in your browser.

Mortality rates

The starting point is the ONS Past and projected period and cohort life tables, 2024-based, UK (principal projection, released May 2026). These give q_x, the probability that someone aged exactly x dies before reaching x + 1, for every age from 0 to 100 and every year from 1981 to 2074, separately for men and women.

For each person, the calculator follows them through the table one year at a time: age 65 in this year, 66 next year, and so on. The chance of still being alive after k years is the product of the chances of surviving each of those years.

Cohort or period

Cohort (the default) uses the rates projected for each future year, so it includes the improvements in mortality the ONS expects.
Period holds the rates at this year's level for the rest of your life. It gives shorter figures and suits a cautious view.

The postcode adjustment

Life expectancy varies a lot between areas. ONS figures for England in 2021 to 2023 show that a man of 65 in the most deprived tenth of areas could expect about 15.0 more years, compared with 21.0 in the least deprived tenth. For women the figures are 17.8 and 23.2.

If you enter a postcode in England, the calculator:

looks up the small area (Lower Layer Super Output Area, around 1,500 people) your postcode belongs to, using the ONS Postcode Directory, and finds its decile in the English Index of Multiple Deprivation 2019
finds the mortality multiplier that reproduces the ONS life expectancy for that decile, at your age band and for your sex, from the ONS dataset Healthy life expectancy by national area deprivation, England, 2021 to 2023
scales that multiplier so the average across all ten deciles is 100%, then applies it to the ONS mortality rates at every future age.

At 65, the multipliers run from about 156% of average mortality for men in the most deprived decile to about 69% in the least deprived. The gap narrows at older ages.

The 2021 to 2023 figures are used rather than 2022 to 2024 because the ONS based the newer figures on the 2025 deprivation index, while the postcode directory used here carries the 2019 index.

Limitations

All figures describe groups of people, not individuals.
Deprivation is measured for the area, not for you. Someone affluent living in a mixed area may be understated.
Postcodes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland use the UK average, because those countries measure deprivation on different scales.
Above age 100 the ONS tables stop. The calculator assumes mortality rises by 8% a year beyond that.
Couples are treated as independent lives.
Projections are uncertain. The ONS also publishes high and low life expectancy variants, which are not used here.

Sources

All ONS data is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

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