Where Do Most People Die? Home, Hospital, Care Home or Hospice

Picture two rooms. One is a hospital bay at three in the morning: a curtain drawn round the bed, the soft beep of a monitor, a nurse moving quietly between patients. The other is a bedroom at home: a familiar quilt, a dog asleep by the door, a radio murmuring in the kitchen downstairs. Ask almost anyone which room they would choose for their final hours, and the answer comes quickly.

Yet for most of the past century, the choice has not been theirs. Around 170,000 people die around the world every day, as you can see on our live counter, and where those deaths happen says a great deal about how a country looks after its dying. In the UK that is about 1,800 deaths a day. So where do they actually take place?

The headline number

The best official data for the UK comes from England, where the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) publishes place-of-death figures every year. In 2023, hospital was still the most common place to die, at 42.8% of deaths. Home came second at 28.4%, then care homes at 21.0%, hospices at 5.2%, and other places (such as roads, workplaces or public spaces) at 2.6%.

Place of death (England, 2023)	Share of deaths
Hospital	42.8%
Home	28.4%
Care home	21.0%
Hospice	5.2%
Other places	2.6%

To get a feel for what that means every day, we can apply England's pattern to the UK's roughly 660,000 deaths a year. This is an illustration rather than an official UK-wide count, since Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publish their own figures, but the overall shape is similar.

Place of death	Approx. per year	Approx. per day	Approx. per hour
Hospital	282,500	770	32
Home	187,400	510	21
Care home	138,600	380	16
Hospice	34,300	94	4
Other places	17,200	47	2
Total	660,000	1,800	75

So on a typical day in Britain, around 770 people die in hospital and around 510 die at home. In the time it takes to make a cup of tea, roughly one more person has died on a hospital ward.

Home deaths are rising

The share of people dying at home in England has climbed noticeably in recent years. In 2019, before the pandemic, it was 24.4%. By 2022 it had reached 28.7%, and it stayed close to that level in 2023.

Year	Home deaths (England)	Hospital deaths (England)
2019	24.4%	n/a in this series
2022	28.7%	43.4%
2023	28.4%	42.8%

Part of that jump was the pandemic. During 2020 and 2021, many people with long-term illnesses avoided hospital, visiting was restricted, and families chose to keep loved ones at home if they could. Some of that shift has stuck. Better community nursing, more people dying of conditions with a predictable course such as cancer and dementia, and a growing awareness that home is possible have all played a part.

Hospice deaths remain a small share, around one in twenty. That surprises many people, because hospice care reaches far more people than the figure suggests: much of it is delivered at home or in care homes, by hospice nurses visiting the bedside, rather than on a hospice ward.

Who dies where

Place of death varies sharply with age and illness. Younger adults who die suddenly, from accidents or heart attacks, are more likely to die in hospital or "other" places. Older people with frailty or dementia are far more likely to die in a care home, which is where many of them have been living. For the oldest group, those 85 and over, care homes play an especially large role.

Typical situation	Most common place of death
Sudden accident or injury	Hospital or other place
Sudden cardiac event	Hospital, home or other place
Cancer with a known prognosis	Home or hospital, increasingly home
Advanced dementia	Care home
Severe frailty in very old age	Care home or hospital
Respiratory illness such as COPD	Hospital, often after an emergency admission

OHID also noted that in 2023, 41.3% of care home deaths were among temporary residents, up from 36.6% in 2019. In other words, a growing number of people move into a care home only in their final weeks, often straight from a hospital discharge.

If you are curious about the hour rather than the place, we looked at that in what time of day do most people die, and at deaths that happen overnight in how many people die in their sleep.

What people want versus what happens

This is where the numbers become uncomfortable. When Marie Curie surveyed 10,500 UK adults for its 2023 public attitudes study, 56% said they would prefer to die at home. Among people who saw themselves as being in their last years of life because of illness, 42% still preferred home, and around one in five preferred a hospice.

Place	Say they would prefer it (UK adults)	Actually die there (England, 2023)
Home	56%	28.4%
Hospice (people with serious illness)	about 20%	5.2%
Hospital	a small minority	42.8%

The gap is not simply a failure of care. Preferences change as illness progresses, and some people decide that a hospital or hospice feels safer for them and their family when the time comes. But researchers and charities agree that many people who want to die at home do not, for reasons that are often practical rather than medical.

Common reason people die in hospital despite wanting home	Why it happens
Emergency admission in the final days	Nobody has a plan for a sudden deterioration out of hours
No one knows their wishes	Wishes were never written down or discussed
Carers are exhausted	Families feel unable to cope with nights alone
Lack of community support	Night nursing and equipment are not always available quickly
Symptoms are hard to control	Pain or breathlessness need hospital treatment

The second row is the one any of us can change today. A clear conversation, and a written record of what you want, gives your family and your doctors something to follow when it matters. We explain what the final days typically look like in what happens in the last days of life, including the role of advance care planning.

The picture in the United States

The US has seen an even more dramatic shift. A landmark analysis by Sarah Cross and Haider Warraich, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2019, found that home had overtaken hospital as the most common place of death for the first time since the early twentieth century. Their figures cover natural deaths, and "home" can include assisted living.

Place of death (US natural deaths)	2003	2017
Hospital	39.7%	29.8%
Home	23.8%	30.7%
Nursing facility	23.6%	20.8%
Hospice facility	0.2%	8.3%

The rise of hospice facilities, from almost nothing to more than one death in twelve, is one of the biggest changes in American end-of-life care in a generation. The pandemic pushed home deaths higher still: one analysis of CDC data on cancer deaths found that the share happening at home jumped from 41.7% to 48.7% in 2020 alone.

With nearly 8,500 Americans dying every day, as we set out in how many people die in the US every day, those percentages represent thousands of families each day facing the same choices.

How other countries compare

Place of death differs enormously around the world. A major international study by Broad and colleagues, covering more than 16 million deaths across 45 populations, found that in half of those populations 54% or more of deaths happened in hospital. The range ran from 78% in Japan to 20% in China.

Measure (45 populations, Broad et al.)	Figure
Median share of deaths in hospital	54%
Highest hospital share (Japan)	78%
Lowest hospital share (China)	20%
Median share of older people dying in aged care	18%

The reasons are as much cultural and economic as medical. In countries with large, well-funded hospital systems and smaller families, hospital death has become the norm. In places where most people live in rural areas, with extended families at home and fewer hospital beds, dying at home remains common, though not always with good access to pain relief. The study also found that the share dying in residential aged care roughly doubled with each additional decade of age.

You can compare broader mortality patterns between nations on our United Kingdom and United States pages, and see how long people can expect to live in each place on our life expectancy page.

What this means for you

Nobody can fully control where they will die. Sudden illness and accidents do not ask permission. But for the many deaths that come after a longer illness, a little planning makes a real difference to whether wishes are met.

Step	Why it helps
Tell someone where you would like to be cared for	Families often guess, and guess wrong
Ask your GP about an advance care plan	It can be shared with paramedics and out-of-hours teams
Write down your wishes	A written record carries more weight in a crisis
Make a will	It settles the practical side, separately from care wishes
Keep key information in one place	So whoever steps in can find it quickly

A will is a good place to start if you have not made one, and our Will Calculator is a gentle introduction. For the wider list of things your family would need, read what your family needs to know when you're gone. If you would like to plan your own send-off too, our guide on how to plan your own funeral walks through each decision. Our When I'm Gone planner brings care wishes, funeral preferences and practical details together in one fillable PDF.

While you were reading

In the eleven minutes it took to read this article, roughly 1,300 people died around the world. In the UK, about 14 people died, and if the usual pattern held, six of them were in hospital, four at home, three in a care home, and perhaps one in a hospice. You can watch the count rising in real time or see today's running total.

Sources: Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, Palliative and End of Life Care Profiles (January 2025 update, 2023 data; December 2023 update, 2022 data); Marie Curie, Public Attitudes to Death and Dying in the UK (2023); Cross SH and Warraich HJ, Changes in the Place of Death in the United States, New England Journal of Medicine (2019); Broad JB et al., Where do people die? An international comparison, International Journal of Public Health (2013); CDC WONDER analyses of place of death for cancer deaths. UK-wide daily figures are illustrative, applying England's 2023 percentages to approximate UK annual deaths. This article is general information, not medical advice.