Number of deaths in the UK 1887-2021

There were 667,479 deaths in the United Kingdom in 2021, compared with 689,629 in 2020. Between 2003 and 2011, the annual number of deaths in the UK fell from 612,085 to just over 552,232. Since 2011 however, the annual number of annual deaths in the United Kingdom has steadily grown, with the number recorded in 2020, the highest since 1918 when there were 715,246 deaths. Both of these spikes in the number of deaths can be attributed to infectious disease pandemics. The great influenza pandemic of 1918, which was at its height towards the end of World War One, and the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a large number of deaths in 2020.

 Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

The weekly death figures for England and Wales highlight the tragic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. In two weeks in April of 2020, there were 22,351 and 21,997 deaths respectively, almost 12,000 excess deaths in each of those weeks. Although hospitals were the most common location of these deaths, a significant number of these deaths also took place in care homes, with 7,911 deaths taking place in care homes for the week ending April 24, 2020, far higher than usual. By the summer of 2020, the number of deaths in England and Wales reached more usual levels, before a second wave of excess deaths hit the country in early 2021. Although subsequent waves of COVID-19 cases resulted in far fewer deaths, the number of excess deaths remained elevated throughout 2022.

Long-term life expectancy trends

As of 2020 the life expectancy for men in the United Kingdom was 79, and almost 83 for women, compared with life expectancies of 75 for men and 80 for women in 2002. Between 2011 and 2017, improvements in life expectancy in the UK started to decline, with average life expectancies stagnating and even going in reverse for women between 2015 and 2017, before recovering slightly since 2015/17. In 2017/19, for example the annual change in life expectancy was 6.26 weeks for men, and 7.3 weeks for women.