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Life Expectancy Is Plateauing, Won't Reach 100, Researchers Say
- September 4, 2025
- Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
Bad news for folks hoping to become a centenarian: Average life expectancy isn’t expected to exceed 100 years anytime soon, a new study says.
Life expectancy gains made by wealthy countries in the first half of the 20th century have slowed significantly, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a result, none of the generations born after 1939 is expected to reach 100 years of age on average, researchers concluded.
“The unprecedented increase in life expectancy we achieved in the first half of the 20th century appears to be a phenomenon we are unlikely to achieve again in the foreseeable future,” said senior researcher Héctor Pifarré i Arolas, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs.
“In the absence of any major breakthroughs that significantly extend human life, life expectancy would still not match the rapid increases seen in the early 20th century even if adult survival improved twice as fast as we predict,” he said in a news release.
From 1900 to 1930, life expectancy rose by about five and a half months for each new generation.
A person born in a wealthy country in 1900 could expect to live to 62 on average, but by 1938 average life expectancy had surged to 80 years.
But between 1939 and 2000, that increase slowed to roughly 2.5 to 3.5 months per generation, researchers estimate.
“We forecast that those born in 1980 will not live to be 100 on average, and none of the cohorts in our study will reach this milestone,” said lead researcher José Andrade, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany.
“This decline is largely due to the fact that past surges in longevity were driven by remarkable improvements in survival at very young ages,” he explained in a news release.
Infant death rates fell rapidly at the beginning of the 20th century, due to medical advances and improvements in quality of life, researchers said. This contributed significantly to life expectancy.
But infant and child death rates are now so low that the pace of advance in life expectancy has slowed, and improvements in medical care among older folks will not be enough to sustain the pace of previous longevity gains, researchers said.
In the U.S., life expectancy is under 76 years on average for men and about 81 for women, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers warned that these forecasts should be taken with a grain of salt, given that an unexpected pandemic, medical breakthrough, or societal or economic upheaval could influence life expectancy in unpredictable ways.
However, these projections might help people make personal decisions about saving, retirement and long-term planning, researchers said.
More information
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on life expectancy.
SOURCE: University of Wisconsin-Madison, news release, Aug. 27, 2025
