Longevity, quantified — by an actuary
Your actuarial age,
rendered from the life table itself.
Every “how long will I live” tool is a scoring gimmick with a quote form bolted on. This one starts from the real U.S. period life table and adjusts it with cited hazard ratios — and lets you watch the cohort behind the number.
The one longevity site run by the profession whose day job is predicting how long you’ll live.
Try it — a live preview
Real NCHS 2021 tables, computed in your browser. Toggle a few habits.
Preview at calendar age 45. Damped combination (λ=0.75), ±12-year cap — the same engine as the full calculator.
Why this reads differently
A number you can interrogate, not just share.
The whole moat is that the figure survives scrutiny. Three commitments make it defensible — and they double as the design.
Real period life tables
The baseline is the published NCHS 2021 U.S. table — the same source class actuaries price on, not a points-add-up quiz. The hero above shows that table as a living cohort.
Every modifier is cited
Each factor is a published hazard ratio translated into years, with the paper linked and an evidence grade shown. No made-up "−2 years for stress."
Honest uncertainty
A point estimate with a visible range, capped where the literature caps it. The data supports about ±12 years between mid-life extremes — not the twenty the podcast promised.
The house currency: years of life
What actually moves the number.
Isolated effect on life expectancy at age 40, straight from the engine — the live calculator combines factors with damping and caps (methodology §4).
The evidence directory
View all →What actually moves life expectancy, in years, with the confidence honesty the podcasts skip.
The single most reliable dial you control: moving from unfit to fit buys years, and the biggest jump is off the bottom of the distribution.
≈ +4 years for the sedentary→fit shift, smaller with age
The largest single modifiable mortality effect we know of, and one of the few where the recovery on quitting is almost as dramatic as the damage.
~10 years lost by current smokers; most recoverable if you quit before 40
A J-shaped mortality curve where the cost of high BMI is real and graded, and the apparent benefit of being slightly heavy is mostly sick people who lost weight.
J-shaped; roughly −2 to −8 years across the obesity bands vs normal BMI
A U-shaped curve where both ends cost you, but the long-sleep arm is largely sick people sleeping more, not sleep making them sick.
U-shaped; short and long sleep each cost ~1–2 years
Why trust an actuary on this?
Predicting how long people live is the actuarial day job. The longevity space is full of biologists and hype merchants; almost nobody writes it from the seat that actually prices mortality for a living. About this site →