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Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Report for the U.S. Population

April 2025

Author

Society of Actuaries Research Institute

Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Oversight Group

Executive Summary

The Society of Actuaries Research Institute (SOA) periodically issues reports that provide a statistical summary of the mortality experience of the general population of the United States (U.S.). These reports include “U.S. Historical Population Mortality Rates”, “Mortality Improvement Update”, and “U.S. Population Mortality Observations”, each of which is released on an annual basis. To supplement these annual reports, the SOA is launching a new report series – the Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Report (QMMR) – to be released every three months. Each QMMR will reflect the latest U.S. mortality data, facilitating the analysis of mortality trends as they unfold each year.

This report is the first of the QMMR series, focusing on mortality data through July 2024. The report also examines data from August to December 2024, although death count data for this period is not yet complete. To offset this concern, historical patterns of data maturation (“completion” in the parlance of actuaries) were used to adjust the incomplete data upwards to enable reasonable estimates of total deaths to be produced.

To quantify the impact of the pandemic on U.S. mortality, this analysis compares age-standardized (or “age-adjusted”) death rates for rolling 12-month periods with corresponding death rates for 2019. Key findings are as follows:

  • After the pandemic led to roughly a 20% increase in national age-standardized death rates, its effects on mortality began to dissipate in 2022. From August 2022 onwards, the 12-month trailing death rates have steadily declined. For the period from August 2023 through July 2024, the national death rate was only 0.8% greater than the level observed in 2019.
  • The estimated death rate for January through December 2024 (which includes five months of data adjusted with completion rates) was 1.1% below the level observed in 2019. Thus, for the U.S. population in the aggregate, the death rate is now about equal to its pre-pandemic level.
  • This aggregate result masks differences by age. Roughly speaking, death rates for ages below 50 remain about 5% to 10% elevated relative to their 2019 levels, while death rates above age 50 are close to or slightly below their 2019 levels.
  • Although death rates under age 50 remain elevated, they have downward momentum, suggesting that convergence with their 2019 levels could potentially occur soon, but with no guarantee of near-term convergence.

Along with this report, the SOA has released an Excel/VBA workbook that contains the data used for the analysis. Each quarter, an updated QMMR workbook will be released, reflecting the latest available mortality data. The QMMR dataset runs from 2000 to the present, disaggregated by sex, single age, and 14 broad categories of mortality causes. The workbook provides several tools to facilitate the analysis of mortality trends, including interactive, parameterized graphs that make it easy to visualize trends in the data.

Materials

2025Q1 Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Report

2025Q1 QMMR Excel/VBA Workbook

2025Q1 QMMR Excel/VBA Workbook Instructional Video

Acknowledgments

The SOA would like to thank the members of the Quarterly Mortality Monitoring Oversight Group for their support, guidance, direction, and feedback throughout the project:

  • Sam Gutterman, FSA, MAAA, FCAS, FCA, HONFIA, CERA
  • Ed Hui, FSA
  • Tom Kukla, FSA, MAAA
  • Larry Stern, FSA, MAAA

 

At the SOA:

  • Barbara Scott, Senior Research Administrator
  • Ronora Stryker, ASA, MAAA, Senior Practice Research Actuary
  • Patrick Wiese, ASA, Lead Modeling Researcher

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