In short
Every number on this site comes from public data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Census Bureau, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps and the State of California. We do not collect health information, and we do not make our own predictions. We combine these public sources so you can see them for the place you live.
What "life expectancy" means
Life expectancy at birth is the average number of years a baby born in an area would live if the death rates measured there stayed the same for their whole life. It summarizes how healthy a whole community is. It cannot tell you how long any one person will live.
The sources
| What we show | Source | Area | Years of deaths |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your neighborhood's life expectancy | U.S. Small-Area Life Expectancy Estimates Project (USALEEP), CDC National Center for Health Statistics, with the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation | Census tract (2010 boundaries) | 2010–2015 |
| County, California and U.S. life expectancy | County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute (supplemental data release, March 2026), based on CDC death records | County, state, nation | 2021–2023 |
| Pollution and health burdens (California only) | CalEnviroScreen 4.0, California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), October 2021 | Census tract (2010 boundaries) | Varies by measure (about 2011–2020) |
| Finding the census tract for an address | U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder | Address | Current |
| Matching ZIP codes to census tracts | U.S. Census Bureau 2010 ZIP Code Tabulation Area to census tract relationship file | ZIP code | 2010 |
How an address lookup works
- You type an address. It goes to our server, which passes it to the U.S. Census Bureau's free geocoder.
- The geocoder returns the census tract the address sits in. A census tract is a small area of about 4,000 people, roughly a neighborhood.
- Your browser looks up that tract's life expectancy in the CDC's USALEEP data. For California addresses, it also looks up the tract's CalEnviroScreen scores.
- We show your tract next to your county, California and the U.S., and next to the longest- and shortest-lived tracts in your county.
We never store your address. See our privacy policy.
The likely range
Tract estimates are based on a small number of deaths, so they carry uncertainty. The CDC publishes a standard error for each tract. We show a 95% range (the estimate plus or minus 1.96 standard errors). For a typical tract, the range spans about 5 to 9 years.
When a tract has no estimate
The CDC did not publish estimates for tracts with too few people or deaths to measure reliably, or where the data didn't meet its quality standards. Roughly 8% of U.S. tracts have no estimate. When that happens, we show the estimate for your ZIP code instead.
How a ZIP code lookup works
ZIP codes are postal delivery routes, not neighborhoods, and no agency publishes life expectancy by ZIP code. To estimate it, we:
- Find every census tract that overlaps the ZIP code, using the Census Bureau's 2010 relationship file.
- Average those tracts' life expectancies, weighting each tract by how many of the ZIP code's residents live in it.
We also show the lowest and highest tract inside the ZIP code. A single ZIP code can hold neighborhoods with very different life expectancies. That is why an address gives a more accurate answer.
Why the neighborhood data is from 2010–2015
USALEEP is the only source of life expectancy for every census tract in the country, and the CDC has not updated it since it was published in 2018. That is why we also show the newer county figures from County Health Rankings & Roadmaps. Keep two things in mind when you compare them:
- The two sources cover different years. The county, state and U.S. figures include 2021–2022, when COVID-19 lowered life expectancy across the country.
- Patterns between neighborhoods tend to last for decades. The places that had shorter lives in 2010–2015 are very likely the same places today.
About CalEnviroScreen
CalEnviroScreen is California's official tool for identifying communities most burdened by pollution. It ranks every census tract in the state on measures of pollution (such as fine particles, diesel exhaust, traffic and toxic releases) and on population factors (such as asthma, heart attacks and poverty). Each score is a statewide percentile: a score of 90 means the tract is more burdened than 90% of California's tracts. For ZIP code lookups, we average the tract percentiles, weighted by population.
CalEnviroScreen measures where pollution and vulnerability are concentrated. On its own, it does not show that pollution caused any particular death. Together with life expectancy, it shows how place, pollution and health line up.
Keeping the data current
We download the source files and build our lookup tables with a script published alongside this site. When a source releases new data, we update the site.