Estimate your life expectancy from your age, sex and lifestyle — and see your projected lifespan. ⏳
Estimate your lifespan
In the US, average life expectancy at birth is roughly 76 years for men and 81 for women. But averages aren't destiny — lifestyle choices shift the number significantly. Smoking can cut a decade off your life, while regular exercise, a healthy diet, good sleep and low stress can add many healthy years. This calculator starts from population baselines and adjusts for the lifestyle factors with the strongest evidence.
Treat the result as a motivational ballpark, not a prediction. The encouraging part: the biggest levers — not smoking, staying active and eating well — are largely within your control, and improving them at any age still pays off.
Life expectancy figures are period estimates drawn from actuarial tables — they describe the average remaining years for people of a given age and sex under current mortality rates, not a prediction for any individual. The most misunderstood property is that expectancy rises with age: a newborn's life expectancy is lower than the age a 70-year-old can expect to reach, because the newborn's figure is dragged down by everyone who dies before 70. That is why retirement planning should use expectancy conditional on reaching retirement, not expectancy at birth.
Expected age at death = current age + remaining life expectancyRemaining expectancy is read from a mortality table by age and sexConditional expectancy rises with attained agePlanning horizon: use the 75th or 90th percentile, not the meanwhere:
Assumptions: Population averages that take no account of individual health, family history, smoking, income or occupation, all of which shift outcomes substantially. Not a medical prognosis.
Compare expectancy at birth with expectancy conditional on reaching 65.
ResultA 65-year-old should plan to about 95, not 79
That 16-year difference between the naive and the prudent planning horizon transforms a retirement calculation. It is also why a 4% withdrawal rate, tested over 30 years, is the convention: 30 years is the realistic planning horizon from 65, not the 14 that expectancy at birth would suggest.