---
type: source
title: "CDC NCHS Data Brief 548: US Life Expectancy Hits All-Time High of 79.0 in 2024, Drug Overdoses Down 26.2%"
author: "National Center for Health Statistics, CDC"
url: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db548.htm
date: 2026-01-29
domain: health
secondary_domains: []
format: government-report
status: processed
processed_by: vida
processed_date: 2026-05-10
priority: high
tags: [life-expectancy, deaths-of-despair, drug-overdose, mortality, epidemiology, population-health, CDC, NCHS]
intake_tier: research-task
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

**CDC NCHS Data Brief No. 548 (January 29, 2026) — Life Expectancy 2024:**

- **Life expectancy at birth: 79.0 years — ALL-TIME HIGH** (up from 78.4 in 2023; above pre-COVID 2019 level of 78.8)
- Males: 76.5 (up 0.7 year); Females: 81.4 (up 0.3 year)
- Age-adjusted death rate: -3.8% overall
- About 3.07 million US residents died in 2024 — approximately 18,000 fewer than 2023

**Causes driving the improvement:**
- Unintentional injuries (includes drug overdoses): largest driver of improvement, down 14%+
- Heart disease: declining
- Cancer: declining
- COVID-19: further dissipation
- Homicide: declining
- Suicide: declined in 2024

**Companion Data Brief 549 — Drug Overdose Deaths 2023-2024:**
- **79,384 drug overdose deaths in 2024** (from peak ~107,500 in 2022)
- Age-adjusted overdose death rate: 23.1/100K (down from 31.3 in 2023)
- **Year-over-year decline: 26.2%** — largest single-year improvement in US drug overdose history
- **Synthetic opioids (primarily fentanyl): -35.6%** (from 22.2 to 14.3/100K)
- About 6 in 10 overdose deaths in 2024 involved fentanyl (down from 9 in 10 in 2023)
- Declines occurred across ALL age groups and ALL racial/ethnic groups; largest declines for Black non-Hispanic people

**Preliminary 2025 data:** Suggests continued improvement; total deaths approximately 3.05 million.

**Context from earlier CDC data:**
- 2022 was the peak crisis year: ~107,500 overdose deaths
- 2021: 78.8 → 76.4 life expectancy drop (COVID + fentanyl)
- 2022-2024: recovery trajectory

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This is a direct empirical challenge to the KB claim "Americas declining life expectancy is driven by deaths of despair" — that claim was accurate for 2017-2023 but life expectancy is NOW AT AN ALL-TIME HIGH. The extractor must decide whether to update the existing claim (temporal scoping: "through 2022") or create a new claim about the 2024 reversal. This is the most important update to Belief 1's grounding evidence.

**What surprised me:** The magnitude. A 26.2% one-year decline in drug overdoses is extraordinary — I expected a more modest recovery. The synthetic opioid decline of 35.6% suggests fentanyl supply disruption, improved naloxone access, and addiction treatment combined to produce a historically unprecedented single-year improvement.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any data suggesting the improvement is structural vs. cyclical. The CDC data confirms the improvement is real but does not address whether it will persist. The IHME 2050 forecast (archived separately) provides the structural counterpoint: US projected to fall to 66th globally by 2050 due to obesity/metabolic disease.

**KB connections:**
- DIRECTLY CHALLENGES: [[Americas declining life expectancy is driven by deaths of despair concentrated in populations and regions most damaged by economic restructuring since the 1980s]] — this claim is now temporally incorrect for 2024
- COMPLICATES: Belief 1 grounding ("compounding failure") — the acute acute dimension is improving
- CONNECTS TO: Big Food companies engineer addictive products by hacking evolutionary reward pathways — food-driven chronic disease threat remains even as drug deaths improve
- CONNECTS TO: IHME 2050 forecast (structural metabolic threat persists)

**Extraction hints:**
- Do NOT write a claim "deaths of despair are no longer a problem" — the structural metabolic disease threat remains
- DO write a claim about the 2024 recovery and what it does/doesn't mean for the structural argument
- The key claim: "US life expectancy recovery to all-time high in 2024 reflects acute mortality improvement (overdose -26.2%) that is partially cyclical, while structural metabolic threats (obesity at 40.3%, IHME projection to 66th globally by 2050) leave Belief 1's civilizational constraint argument intact"
- Also consider: the existing KB claim needs temporal scoping — "Americas declining life expectancy" should become "Americans' historically declining life expectancy (2017-2022)"

**Context:** CDC's National Center for Health Statistics — authoritative source for official US mortality statistics. Data Brief 548 is the primary life expectancy publication. Data Brief 549 is the drug-specific companion. This is official government data from provisional vital statistics.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[Americas declining life expectancy is driven by deaths of despair concentrated in populations and regions most damaged by economic restructuring since the 1980s]] — this claim needs updating
WHY ARCHIVED: The life expectancy reversal is a significant factual update to the KB's foundation for Belief 1. The claim that life expectancy is "declining" is now factually wrong for 2024.
EXTRACTION HINT: Temporal scoping is the key operation. The deaths of despair story was real through 2022. The 2024 all-time high changes the narrative — create a new claim that holds both: the historical decline AND the structural threat that persists despite acute recovery. The IHME 2050 data (separate archive) provides the structural counterpoint.
