Will You Reach 85? A Period Table Won't Tell You

If you have typed "will I live to 85" into a search box and landed on a life expectancy figure, there is a fair chance you looked up the wrong number for the question you were actually asking. The chance of living to 85 in the UK is a real and knowable thing, but the headline life expectancy figure most people find is built on an assumption that deliberately understates it for anyone alive today. Before you take that figure to heart, it is worth knowing which table it came from and what that table quietly assumes.

There are two kinds of life table, and they answer different questions. A period table freezes the death rates observed in one recent span of years and applies them at every future age, so it assumes, on purpose, that nothing ever improves. A cohort table lets the rates change as you get older, allowing for the improvements that are expected to continue. For a person who is alive now and wants to know their own odds of reaching 85, the cohort figure is the relevant one, and it is higher than the period figure almost everyone quotes.

This page explains why the gap exists, why it runs in your favour, and how to find the figure that actually applies to someone your age and sex — rather than the pessimistic one that assumes medicine and public health stopped advancing the year the data was collected.

The short answer: you probably looked up the wrong number

The number that appears when you search for UK life expectancy is almost always a period life expectancy, usually drawn from the most recent three-year span of the national life tables. It is an honest figure, but it answers a hypothetical question: how long would a person live if the death rates of those particular years applied, unchanged, for the whole of their life? Since death rates at older ages have tended to fall over time, freezing them in place builds pessimism into the answer.

The question you were really asking — will I, a person alive right now, reach 85 — is a cohort question. It needs a table that lets the death rate at age 70 or 80 be lower by the time you actually get there than it is today, because that is what the evidence of the last century suggests will happen. When you use the right table, the answer moves upward, often by a meaningful margin.

So the correction is not that the statistics were wrong. It is that the wrong statistic was being used for a personal question. A period table is the correct tool for comparing one year with another or one country with another. A cohort table is the correct tool for asking about your own future.

Period and cohort: what the two tables actually do

The distinction is easier to hold with a picture. Imagine a man aged 50 today. To work out his chance of reaching 85, you have to know the death rate he will face at 51, 52, and so on, all the way to 85 — thirty-five separate one-year risks chained together.

A period table fills in every one of those thirty-five risks using the rates seen in one recent period. The rate it uses for "age 84" is the rate eighty-four-year-olds died at in that recent span — men born in the 1930s. A cohort table instead asks what the death rate at age 84 is likely to be in the year this man actually turns 84, decades from now, and uses a projection of that. Because mortality at older ages has generally improved from one generation to the next, the cohort rate for a future year is usually lower, and the survival chance it produces is correspondingly higher.

Both are produced by the Office for National Statistics, and neither is a trick. The period table is deliberately assumption-light, which is exactly why it is used for fair comparisons. The cohort table carries an explicit projection of the future, which is exactly why it is the right one for a living individual. The mistake is only ever in matching the tool to the question.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Life tables (principal projection), 2024-based, and the National life tables, UK, both published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Why the period table understates your odds of reaching 85

Put plainly, the period figure understates a living person's survival because it assumes away the single most consistent trend in modern mortality: that it keeps getting better. Across the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, death rates at most ages fell, sometimes dramatically. A table that pretends those improvements halt at the date of collection is bound to give a lower chance of reaching a high age than the fuller, projected picture does.

The size of the understatement is not fixed, and it is larger at older target ages than younger ones, because there is more future — and therefore more expected improvement — between now and 85 than between now and, say, 60. This is why the period-versus-cohort gap matters so much precisely for a question like reaching 85, and matters far less for a question about the next year or two.

It cuts the other way for honesty, too. A cohort projection is not a promise; it is the central estimate of an uncertain future, and it comes with a range around it. The right way to read it is as the best available answer to your question, not as a guarantee — better than the period figure for a personal question, but still an average across a projected population rather than a forecast about you.

What a projection can and cannot tell you

A cohort figure depends on assumptions about how fast mortality improves in the decades ahead, and those assumptions are genuinely uncertain. The rapid year-on-year gains of the late twentieth century did not continue at the same pace: improvements in UK life expectancy slowed markedly through the 2010s, and the pandemic period disrupted the series further. That is one reason the national life tables are published as three-year averages, and one reason projections are revised as new evidence arrives.

None of that undoes the basic point. Even allowing for slower improvement, a cohort table still expects future death rates at older ages to be lower than today's, so it still gives a higher chance of reaching 85 than a period table does. What the uncertainty means is humility about the exact figure, not a return to the pessimistic one. If you want the surrounding argument about how a headline "average age of death" gets misread in several different ways at once, we set out the four different numbers people all call the average age of death, only one of which answers any given question.

Why the national figure is not your figure

Even the correct cohort figure has a limit that no amount of choosing the right table can fix: it describes an average across millions of people, and you are not the average. A national life table knows your age and your sex and nothing else. It does not know whether you smoke, what you do for a living, how much you drink, what your blood pressure is, or what runs in your family. All of those sit outside the table, and for an individual they can matter more than the period-versus-cohort distinction does.

That is worth remembering in both directions. If you are anxious because a parent died young, the national figure neither confirms nor calms that on its own; what your family history means for you is a separate question, and often a smaller effect than people fear. If you have never known your family history at all — because you were adopted, for instance — a life table still applies to you perfectly well, and we cover how that blank is handled on a real application in being adopted with no family medical history to give. And if a genetic report has unsettled you, it is worth knowing that a susceptibility result is not a verdict; our piece on an APOE Alzheimer's result and UK life cover explains why such a result shifts risk rather than settling it.

How to find the number that actually applies to you

You do not have to chain the rates together yourself. The Office for National Statistics publishes an interactive life expectancy tool that takes your age and sex and returns both a life expectancy and a chance of reaching older ages, using the projected rather than the frozen rates. It is the closest thing to a straight answer to "will I reach 85" that a national dataset can give, and it is free. You can find it on the Office for National Statistics website.

Two habits make the figure more useful. First, read it at your current age, not at birth: a figure quoted "at birth" includes everyone who died in infancy and childhood, so having already reached 40 or 50 lifts your own expected age at death above the at-birth headline. Second, treat the result as a well-founded average to plan around, not a personal prophecy — the point of getting the right number is better planning, not certainty.

What this means if you are planning around it

Most people who ask whether they will reach 85 are really asking a planning question underneath: how long do I need to provide for, and what happens to the people around me if I do not get there? For that, the exact survival percentage matters less than making sure the arrangements exist at all.

If you have children, the survival question and the guardianship question are linked, and the second is more neglected. It is worth knowing whether you can name two guardians who do not live together, and whether you should tell someone you have named them as guardian, long before any of it is needed. On the administrative side, families are often surprised by how much still has to be done by hand after a death; the government's own service has limits, which we set out in the organisations Tell Us Once will never contact for you.

And if the real reason you looked up your odds is that someone depends on your income or shares your mortgage, the useful next step is not a better statistic but a concrete figure for your own situation. You can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price cover against your actual term and circumstances. What no page here will do is quote a cost or promise an outcome, because both depend on your health and on an insurer's underwriting. For the wider set of questions about survival odds and family history, our guide to family history, inherited risk and the odds brings them together.

Frequently asked questions

What is the chance of living to 85 in the UK?

It depends on your current age and sex, and on which table you use. A period life table freezes today's death rates for the rest of your life, while a cohort projection allows for expected future improvements and therefore gives a higher chance of reaching 85. The ONS life expectancy calculator returns the cohort-based figure for your own age and sex.

What is the difference between period and cohort life expectancy?

Period life expectancy applies the death rates observed in one recent span of years at every future age, so it deliberately assumes no improvement. Cohort life expectancy uses projected rates that change as you age. ONS publishes both, and for a person alive today the cohort figure is the relevant one, because it does not pretend mortality has stopped improving.

Does that mean I will live longer than the headline figure?

It means the headline understates typical survival for someone alive today, because it holds mortality rates still. It says nothing about you individually. Your health, smoking status, occupation and family history all sit outside a national table describing an average across millions of people, and for one person those factors can outweigh the choice of table.