Your Ticking Countdown Clock

Suppose, for an instant, that there’s nothing unique about you, other than being an average American that has reached your current age. As such an average American, how much longer can you reasonably expect to live?

That isn’t an idle question! While unique circumstances such as your heredity and your lifestyle choices certainly affect your odds of reaching a given age, where the government is concerned, you’re just a statistic. A numeric blip around which things like future spending levels for Medicare and Social Security benefits are determined, where you are just a number to be managed. Managed, that is, until your personal lifespan countdown clock stops ticking.

How much time do the government’s planners, who don’t know you any better than we do, think you have left?

Answering that question is what our latest tool is all about! We extracted the latest remaining life expectancy data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ United States Life Tables for 2014, which is the most recent data available. From that data, we constructed a mathematical model to represent the remaining life expectancy for all Americans given their current age. The following chart shows the model we created against the official remaining life expectancy data.

From here, if you want to estimate how much time you have remaining, assuming that you’re an average American drawn from random among the total population, just enter your current age into the tool below. If you’re reading this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, please click here to access a working version of the tool on our site.

Because the life tables don’t extend beyond Age 100, we’ve capped the maximum age to that level for our tool’s results. If you enter a higher age, you’ll get the results for Age 100. We’ve likewise set a minimum age of 0 for the tool as well.

If you’d like to get a better indication of how much time you, as an individual, might reasonably expect to live, we recommend the Living to 100 calculator, which allows you to factor in many of the unique factors that can significantly influence how long you’ll actually live.

Previously on Political Calculations

• Will You Ever Be 100? – Well, will you? There’s only one way to find out, and you will need to click through to do so!
• Estimating Your Age Like a Tree – Aren’t sure how old you are? We have a tool for that!
• How Much Longer Can You Expect to Live? – Our original tool, built using the data from the 2004 U.S. life tables. If you want to see how life expectancy for your age has changed over the past decade, this is the tool for you….