The average life expectancy at birth in the European Union (EU) dropped from 81.3 years in 2019 to 80.4 years in 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, data from European statistics agency Eurostat shows; this represents the biggest annual drop registered since data collection began in 2002.
Life expectancy at birth is a hypothetical average number of years a person is expected to live, if the mortality (the number of deaths as a proportion of the population) on their birth year is assumed to remain the same throughout their life. In other words, a person born in the EU in 2020 is expected to live for 80.4 years on average, nine months less than a person born in 2019, assuming all other conditions remain the same.
In 2020, 5,184,077 people died in the EU, over 530,000 more deaths than in 2019 (4,653,033 deaths), indicating an increase in the crude death rate from 10.4 per 1,000 persons in 2019 to 11.6 in 2020.
Across 27 EU Member States, 23 registered a drop in the average life expectancy in 2020, excluding Denmark, Estonia, Finland and Cyprus. The highest drop was recorded in Spain, where it fell from 84.0 years in 2019 to 82.4 years (a decrease of 1.6 years), followed by Bulgaria and Poland, each with a decrease of 1.5 years. Nine Member States witnessed their national average of life expectancy decrease by one or more year in 2020 compared to 2019.
Luxembourg too recorded a drop in life expectancy at birth of five months between 2019 (82.7 years) and 2020 (82.2 years).
Overall, the average life expectancy at birth in the EU increased from 77.6 years in 2002 to 80.4 years in 2020, whilst in Luxembourg, it increased from 78.1 years in 2002 to 82.2 years in 2020.
The highest life expectancy at birth in 2020 was recorded in Ireland at 82.6 years and the lowest in Bulgaria at 73.6 years.
In terms of gender, women continued to have higher life expectancy than men. In 2020, the average life expectancy of women was 5.7 years higher (83.2 years) than that of men (77.5 years). In Luxembourg, the average life expectancy at birth for women was 84.5 years, 4.6 years more than 79.9 years for men.
