WASHINGTON – Heart disease killed more Americans in 2025 than in any year on record. The number of people who died from cancer rose for the second consecutive year. Deaths from influenza and pneumonia surged nearly 17 percent, enough to push the respiratory illness from the 11th to the 8th leading cause of death in the country.
And yet, measured the way epidemiologists actually measure it, Americans have never been safer from death than they were last year.
A provisional mortality report published Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics found the age-adjusted death rate in the United States fell to 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 2025, a 4.6 percent decline from 722.1 in 2024 and the lowest figure ever recorded since the United States began systematic mortality accounting. The rate decreased for every age group and for both men and women.
The apparent contradiction between rising absolute death counts and a falling age-adjusted rate resolves when population structure is taken into account. The United States has more people and an older population than in any previous year. More people of advanced age means more absolute deaths even as age-specific death rates improve. The age-adjusted figure removes that distortion, allowing a comparison across years that controls for the population’s changing shape.
The three leading causes of death in 2025 were heart disease, which killed 694,708 people; cancer, which accounted for 622,832 deaths; and unintentional injuries, which caused 184,265 deaths. Stroke followed at 171,427 deaths, with chronic lower respiratory diseases (148,408), Alzheimer’s disease (116,794), and diabetes (95,229) rounding out the seven deadliest conditions.
The most notable shift in the ranking was influenza and pneumonia, which accounted for 56,511 deaths in 2025 compared with 48,139 in 2024, a jump of more than 17 percent that moved it from the 11th to the 8th leading cause of death. The report, prepared by Farida B. Ahmad, Jodi A. Cisewski, and Robert N. Anderson at the NCHS, does not identify the cause of the surge. Whether it reflects a particularly virulent influenza season, gaps in vaccination coverage, or both is not addressed in the provisional data.
Suicide fell from the 10th to the 11th leading cause of death, with 48,789 deaths in 2025 compared with 48,824 in 2024, a statistically marginal change, but the directional shift carries weight given sustained public health attention to mental health in recent years.
The improvements were not distributed evenly across the population. Death rates for Black non-Hispanic Americans, while declining from 884.4 per 100,000 in 2024 to 869.0 in 2025, remained higher than those for all other racial and ethnic groups. American Indian and Alaska Native people, a population that has faced compounding health disadvantages from limited access to healthcare, high rates of chronic disease, and underfunded tribal health systems, saw their age-adjusted death rate rise from 786.1 in 2024 to 803.8 in 2025, a statistically significant increase. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander people also saw their rate rise, from 682.7 to 746.0. Death rates for Asian non-Hispanic people showed no significant change from the prior year.
The sharpest proportional decline among working-age adults came in the 25-to-34 age group, whose crude death rate fell from 124.5 per 100,000 in 2024 to 111.1 in 2025. That cohort has been among the most exposed to fatal drug overdoses over the past decade, and the drop in that age group is consistent with what a sustained decline in overdose deaths would produce, although the NCHS tracks drug overdose deaths in a separate provisional report that was not reviewed here.
Data in this analysis include 99.9 percent of death records received by the agency as of May 10, 2026. The report notes that unintentional injuries, the category that includes overdose deaths, are known to carry a more substantial reporting lag than other causes, meaning the final count for that category is likely to be higher than currently reported. The agency cautions that the provisional figures may consequently underestimate the full extent of decline in that category.
The report is the first to reflect provisional mortality data using updated Census Bureau population estimates under the vintage 2025 methodology, which adjusted for certain elements of the 2020 census that were not corrected in earlier methods. Those adjustments affect comparisons for groups with smaller populations, including American Indian and Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander people, and the NCHS advises interpreting changes in those groups with particular caution until final data are available.
Even with those limitations, the provisional data are the earliest comprehensive signal of national mortality trends and are publicly available through the CDC’s WONDER database. The record low overall rate arrives during a period of sustained uncertainty about the future of federal health programs, including budget negotiations that have already begun to reshape the funding available to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the agencies whose surveillance systems generate data like these. Whether the trend that produced the 2025 record continues in 2026 is the question the report cannot yet answer. What earlier this summer looked like a record-breaking West Nile virus season and a measles case count on track to be the highest in 35 years suggest that the underlying infectious disease landscape in 2026 is already behaving differently from the year that set the record.
