What Are the Odds of Dying From Everyday Causes? The Real Numbers
Lifetime odds of dying from heart disease, cancer, car crashes, falls, drowning, lightning and more, with the method behind every number.
Picture an airport departure lounge on a stormy evening. A passenger grips the armrest every time the wind rattles the windows, convinced this is the flight that goes down. An hour earlier the same person drove to the airport in the rain at 70 miles an hour, checking their phone at the lights, without a second thought. Statistically, the drive was the dangerous part of the day.
We are terrible at judging risk. We fear what is dramatic, rare and out of our control, and we shrug at what is common, slow and familiar. The numbers tell a very different story. About 62 million people die every year worldwide, roughly two every second, which you can see on our live death counter. The question this article answers is simple: of all the ways those deaths happen, how likely is each one to be yours?
How lifetime odds are worked out
There are two standard ways to turn death statistics into personal odds.
Method 1: share of all deaths. If 30% of all deaths are caused by heart disease, then a person born today has roughly a 30% chance, or about 1 in 3.3, of eventually dying from it, assuming today's patterns hold. This is the method we use for the global figures below.
Method 2: the National Safety Council method. The US National Safety Council (NSC) divides the population by the number of deaths from a cause in one year to get the one-year odds, then divides that by life expectancy to get lifetime odds. For a stable population the two methods give similar answers.
Both methods share the same limits. They describe an average person, not you. Your age, sex, country, habits and family history shift every number. They also assume that today's death rates will stay the same for the rest of your life, which they will not. Treat them as a sense of scale, not a forecast.
Your global lifetime odds, by cause
Using the latest annual estimates from the WHO and the Global Burden of Disease study, and dividing each one into roughly 62 million deaths a year, here is how likely each cause is to be the one that ends a typical human life.
| Cause | Deaths a year (approx.) | Share of all deaths | Lifetime odds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cardiovascular disease | 18,600,000 | 30% | 1 in 3 |
| Cancer | 10,000,000 | 16% | 1 in 6 |
| Chronic respiratory disease | 3,900,000 | 6.3% | 1 in 16 |
| Lower respiratory infections | 2,600,000 | 4.2% | 1 in 24 |
| Diabetes | 2,000,000 | 3.2% | 1 in 31 |
| Dementia | 1,500,000 | 2.4% | 1 in 41 |
| Tuberculosis | 1,250,000 | 2.0% | 1 in 50 |
| Road injuries | 1,190,000 | 1.9% | 1 in 52 |
| Falls | 684,000 | 1.1% | 1 in 91 |
| Suicide | 700,000 | 1.1% | 1 in 89 |
| HIV/AIDS | 630,000 | 1.0% | 1 in 98 |
| Malaria | 597,000 | 1.0% | 1 in 104 |
| Homicide | about 450,000 | 0.7% | 1 in 138 |
| Drowning | about 300,000 | 0.5% | 1 in 207 |
Heart disease and cancer between them account for almost half of all deaths. If you want to know what is most likely to kill you, the honest answer for most people is one of those two, decades from now.
These are world averages, and the world is very unequal. In a high-income country, the odds of dying from malaria or tuberculosis are close to zero, while the odds of dying from dementia or cancer are much higher, because people live long enough to reach the ages when those diseases strike.
The rare and the dramatic
Now the causes that fill news bulletins and nightmares. These figures are much less precise, because the annual death counts are small and vary a lot from year to year, so we give rough ranges.
| Cause | Typical deaths a year worldwide | Lifetime odds (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Snakebite | 81,000 to 138,000 | 1 in 450 to 1 in 750 |
| Natural disasters (average year) | 40,000 to 60,000 | 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 1,500 |
| Lightning | 6,000 to 24,000 | 1 in 2,600 to 1 in 10,000 |
| Commercial airline crashes | usually 100 to 500 | about 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 600,000 |
| Shark attacks | about 5 to 10 | about 1 in 6 million to 1 in 12 million |
You are hundreds of times more likely to die from a fall than in a plane crash, and more than a hundred thousand times more likely to die from heart disease than from a shark. We look at how air travel and driving compare per mile and per journey in is flying safer than driving?, and at which animals are really the most dangerous in the deadliest animals in the world. Spoiler: it is not sharks.
The US National Safety Council odds
The most widely quoted odds tables come from the NSC's annual "Odds of Dying" analysis, based on US death certificates. The exact figures change a little each year. These are rounded from recent editions.
| Cause (United States) | Lifetime odds (approx.) |
|---|---|
| Heart disease | 1 in 6 |
| Cancer | 1 in 7 |
| All preventable injuries combined | 1 in 17 |
| Opioid overdose | about 1 in 55 to 1 in 60 |
| Suicide | about 1 in 90 |
| Motor vehicle crash | about 1 in 95 |
| Fall | about 1 in 100 |
| Gun assault | about 1 in 250 |
| Pedestrian incident | about 1 in 500 |
| Drowning | about 1 in 1,000 |
| Fire or smoke | about 1 in 1,500 |
| Choking on food | about 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 3,000 |
| Dog attack | about 1 in 50,000 |
| Bee, wasp or hornet sting | about 1 in 55,000 |
| Lightning | well over 1 in 100,000 |
Two things stand out. In the US, drug overdoses now carry higher lifetime odds than car crashes, a reversal that happened within the last decade, which we cover in how many people die from drug overdoses every day. And "all preventable injuries", the category that covers crashes, falls, poisonings, drowning and so on, is about 1 in 17, far higher than most people would guess.
Your odds of dying this year, by age
Lifetime odds hide the most important variable of all: age. The chance of dying within the next 12 months is tiny for most of life and then climbs steeply. These approximate figures come from UK national life tables, averaged across men and women. Men's risk is higher at every age.
| Age | Chance of dying in the next year (approx.) |
|---|---|
| 1 | about 1 in 5,000 |
| 10 | about 1 in 10,000 or lower |
| 20 | about 1 in 2,500 |
| 40 | about 1 in 800 |
| 50 | about 1 in 350 |
| 60 | about 1 in 150 |
| 70 | about 1 in 60 |
| 80 | about 1 in 20 |
| 90 | about 1 in 6 |
| 100 | about 1 in 3 |
Ten-year-olds are the safest humans alive. From about the age of 30, the risk of death roughly doubles every eight years, a pattern known as the Gompertz law that holds remarkably well across countries. It is the same curve that powers our Death Clock, and you can see the global picture in our death rate by age group article and the age group pages.
Micromorts: comparing everyday risks
In the 1970s the Stanford researcher Ronald Howard proposed a unit for tiny risks: the micromort, a one-in-a-million chance of death. The Cambridge statistician David Spiegelhalter has used it to compare everyday activities. These figures are rough averages for the UK.
| Activity | Approximate micromorts |
|---|---|
| An average day for a UK adult (accidental death) | about 1 |
| Driving 230 miles by car | 1 |
| Cycling 20 miles | 1 |
| Walking 17 miles | 1 |
| Riding 6 miles on a motorbike | 1 |
| Flying 6,000 miles on a commercial jet | 1 |
| A scuba dive | about 5 |
| Running a marathon | about 7 |
| A skydive | about 8 to 10 |
| Giving birth in the UK (mother) | about 120 |
Per mile, a motorbike is around 40 times riskier than a car. A single skydive carries about the same risk as driving 2,000 miles. Running a marathon sounds dangerous because of the rare cardiac deaths that make the news, but it carries about the same one-day risk as a long car journey, and regular running cuts your long-term risk of dying by far more, as we show in how much exercise it takes to lower your risk of dying.
Why our sense of risk is so wrong
Psychologists have spent decades on why we fear the wrong things. A few explanations keep coming up.
| Bias | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | We judge risk by how easily examples come to mind | Plane crashes get blanket coverage; heart attacks rarely make the news |
| Dread | Sudden, gruesome or uncontrollable deaths feel worse | Shark attacks feel scarier than diabetes |
| Control | We feel safer doing things we control | Drivers feel safer than passengers on a plane |
| Familiarity | Everyday risks fade into the background | Stairs, baths and ladders cause many falls |
| Delay | Risks that play out over decades feel unreal | Smoking, inactivity and poor diet |
The biggest risks in most people's lives are the slow ones: smoking, high blood pressure, inactivity, poor diet and alcohol. They do not feel like risks at all because their effects arrive years later. Yet together they shape most of the top rows of the first table in this article.
What you can actually change
Your odds are not fixed. The biggest levers, in rough order of impact for most adults, are:
- Not smoking. Smoking takes around ten years off life expectancy on average, and stopping by 40 recovers most of that.
- Controlling blood pressure. High blood pressure is the single largest risk factor for death worldwide. We cover it in how many people die from high blood pressure every day.
- Moving every day. Even modest activity sharply reduces the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes and several cancers.
- Drinking less. Alcohol raises the risk of cancer, liver disease, injuries and violence.
- Basic safety. Seatbelts, smoke alarms, not drinking and driving, learning to swim, and making homes safer for older relatives to prevent falls.
If you want to see how your own habits shift your numbers, our risk calculator turns these population figures into a personal estimate, and how will you die? shows which causes are most likely for someone of your age and sex.
While you were reading this
You have spent about 12 minutes with this article. In that time, roughly 1,400 people have died around the world. Around 420 of them died from heart disease or stroke and about 230 from cancer. Perhaps 27 died in road crashes. In all likelihood, none of them was killed by a shark.
You can follow today's running total on our deaths today page, or watch every death on earth as it happens on the live death counter.
Data sources: World Health Organization Global Health Estimates and fact sheets (falls, drowning, snakebite, suicide), Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Global Burden of Disease study, UN Office on Drugs and Crime (homicide), US National Safety Council Injury Facts "Odds of Dying", Office for National Statistics national life tables, David Spiegelhalter and Michael Blastland, "The Norm Chronicles" (micromorts), International Shark Attack File, EM-DAT. Lifetime odds are approximate, assume current death rates continue, and describe population averages rather than any individual. Figures for rare causes vary substantially from year to year. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice.
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