Korea's Life Expectancy Is 83.7 Years — Women 3rd, Men 11th in the World

Ride the Seoul subway once and you’ll notice it fast: there are a lot of elderly people. But look closer, and they’re not just numerous — plenty of them are climbing the station stairs on their own, gripping a hiking pole on the way up a mountain, or playing badminton in the park at six in the morning, well into their eighties.

None of this is a coincidence. Korea is now one of the longest-living nations on Earth, and it got there at a speed with no real precedent in human history.

So how long do Koreans actually live?

83.7 years. That’s the figure from the 2024 life tables released by the National Data Agency on December 3, 2025.

A life table is a calculation of “how long will a baby born today live.” It gathers every death reported during 2024 and simulates what happens if that year’s age-specific death rates hold steady into the future. So 83.7 isn’t a prophecy — it’s closer to a report card that compresses the state of Korean health in 2024 into a single number.

Here’s how Korea lines up against the world’s top tier.

🌍 OECD life expectancy leaders (standardized to 2023 — National Data Agency, "Quality of Life 2025")

On the same 2023 basis, Korea ranks 6th, just 0.8 years behind Switzerland at the top. Rankings shuffle a step or two every year because each country updates its statistics on a different schedule, but one fact doesn’t change: the leaders are bunched within 0.1–0.2 years of each other. Remember that half a century ago Koreans lived more than ten years less than the Swiss, and Korea’s mere presence on this table becomes the story.

Why are women 3rd but men 11th?

Here’s the strangest number in this whole piece. Same country, same air, same hospitals, same dinner table — and the rankings sit eight rungs apart.

Women’s 86.6 years is 3rd in the OECD, just 0.5 years behind Japan at the top. Men’s 80.8 years is 11th, a full 1.6 years behind Switzerland. The gender gap: 5.8 years.

What’s interesting is that the gap is shrinking. Korea’s male–female life expectancy difference peaked at 8.6 years in 1985, then narrowed to 5.8 years over the following four decades. Forty years of men smoking less, factories getting safer, and fewer people dying on the roads — all of it stamped into a single number.

21 years in 54 years — how fast is that, really?

In 1970, life expectancy in Korea was 62.3 years. A baby born then is fifty-five today, and the country’s lifespan has grown 21 years in the meantime.

📈 Korea's life expectancy over time (National Data Agency life tables)

The year to notice is 2022 — the first time life expectancy had fallen since the tables began in 1970. It dropped 0.9 years, from 83.6 to 82.7. That was COVID-19 leaving a scar on the statistics, and most of it was erased when 0.8 years came back in 2023.

Secret No. 1 — hospitals are absurdly close

When explaining Korean longevity, the first number should be neither kimchi nor doenjang. It’s this.

Koreans visit the doctor 17.9 times a year on average — roughly 2.7 times the OECD average and comfortably first among member countries. Yet the country has only 2.6 physicians per 1,000 people, far below the OECD average of 4.0 and among the lowest.

In other words, few doctors see an enormous number of patients. Whether that structure is sustainable has been debated for years in medical circles, but judged purely by the outcome metric of lifespan, the effect is clear: people go to a neighborhood clinic at the first sniffle, and big illnesses get caught early. The universal health insurance completed in 1989 is the foundation of that access.

Secret No. 2 — the dinner table and the scale

The second pillar is diet. But rather than the cliché of “kimchi cures everything,” it’s more accurate to explain it with one much simpler number.

In OECD data where height and weight are actually measured rather than self-reported, Korea’s adult overweight and obesity rate is 36.7% — the lowest after Japan among countries with measured data. By the same measure, the U.S. is around 73% and Mexico over 74%. That means the single biggest risk factor for cardiovascular disease and diabetes is being kept low at the population level — and when a 2017 Lancet team explained Korean longevity, the first thing they credited was improvement in cardiovascular health.

What actually works at the table, roughly:

Secret No. 3 — the city makes you walk

The third is urban design. Anyone who has spent a few days in Seoul learns it through their legs first: Korean cities keep you on your feet.

To ride the subway you go down the stairs, to transfer you walk some more, and once you surface you walk to your destination. Even car owners take the subway downtown because of parking. The result: movement itself becomes exercise, not something you schedule. In an American-style suburb, the walk from garage to car to parking lot to store amounts to a few dozen meters.

Add two distinctively Korean extras:

• Hiking — 70% of the country is mountains, and Seoul itself contains Bukhansan, Gwanaksan, and Inwangsan inside the city limits. Weekend hiking is the standard leisure of the middle-aged and older.
• National health screening — both employees and the self-employed get basic checkups free or cheap once every year or two, with cancer screening designed by age.

But living long and living healthy aren't the same

This is the most important section of the article. That 83.7 figure has a catch.

Life expectancy excluding time spent ill is 65.5 years. You live 83.7 years, but roughly 18 of them are spent sick. By sex, that’s 16.2 years of illness for men and 20.2 for women. Women live longer — and are sick longer.

But there’s a twist in the indicator. Life expectancy excluding illness has actually been shrinking lately. It looks like Koreans are getting sicker, but the National Data Agency’s explanation is the opposite.

So you have to read the two indicators together. Koreans rate themselves healthy for 73.8 years on average, and that figure has risen steadily for both sexes since measurement began in 2012. An objective indicator falling while a subjective one rises — that disconnect is about as close as you’ll get to the reality of Korea’s aging society.

So how long will I live?

Life expectancy is calculated for newborns. Someone who has already survived a while has cleared some of the danger zones, so the numbers shift.

⏳ Remaining life expectancy by age, 2024 (National Data Agency 2024 life tables)

A 40-year-old Korean man can expect to reach 81.9; a 40-year-old woman, 87.4. Survivors to 80 push further still, to 88.5 and 90.9.

The life table even tells you what people die of.

🩺 Probability that a baby born in 2024 dies of a given cause

Overall, cancer ranks first at 19.5% — one person in five. And compared with ten years ago, the cause whose probability rose most for both sexes wasn’t cancer; it was pneumonia, because an aging population means more people reach the point where pneumonia becomes the final cause.

The odds of reaching 100 are 1.2% for men and 4.8% for women. In fact, at the end of 2025, about 8,700 registered residents were 100 or older, more than 80% of them women.

In 2030, humanity’s first 90-year average

In 2017, a research team at Imperial College London, working with the WHO, published a paper in The Lancet. It estimated 2030 life expectancy in 35 industrialized countries using an ensemble of 21 forecast models — and the conclusion ran in a single sentence across the world’s media.

The team’s reasons weren’t romantic — not kimchi, not ginseng. It was the steady improvement in cardiovascular mortality, healthcare access that reaches nearly everyone, and rising education and nutrition among women.

Still, the measured figure for 2024 is 86.6 years. Hitting 90.8 would mean adding 4.2 years in the six years left before 2030, so whether the forecast holds is anyone’s guess — the researchers themselves put the odds at a cautious 57%.

The other side of the number

Ending the longevity story here would only be telling half of it. The same country holds some other numbers at the same time.

• Korea’s suicide rate is 1st among OECD countries, and has been for 21 years straight since 2003. The age-standardized rate is 23.2 per 100,000 — more than double the OECD average of 10.7.
• The poverty rate for people 66 and older is 39.7%, 1st in the OECD against an average of 14.8%. Living long and living stably long are different problems.
• With the world’s lowest birth rate layered on top of long lives, Korea is aging faster than any other country. In 2025, people 65 and older numbered 10.84 million — 21.2% of the population.

A life expectancy of 83.7 years is both the result of half a century of Korean medical and public-health achievement and the bill that’s now coming due. Behind the healthy seniors you meet on the subway, two stories run side by side.