Ranking one

The healthiest countries

Five metrics, each converted to a percentile rank and averaged, so no single skewed measure dominates. A score of 100 would mean best-in-world on all five. The United States comes 43rd of 157.

Life expectancy & HALE Infant & maternal mortality HALE at age 60

The top twenty, and where America lands

Composite score · 157 countries with population over 1 million and complete data

Composite health score

Top 20 of 157 · the United States shown in position

Japan leads on three of the five component metrics outright. The gap between the tenth-placed country and the United States is wider than the gap between first and tenth.

Years for life expectancy and HALE; infant deaths per 1,000 live births; maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. World Bank WDI 2023–24; WHO GHO HALE 2021.
#	Country	Score	Life exp.	HALE	Infant mort.	Maternal mort.	HALE at 60

Where the US sits in the full field

Each tick is a country, ordered best to worst · 157 countries

Life expectancy at birth

78.9 years

Healthy life expectancy (HALE)

63.9 years — the weakest of the five

Infant mortality

5.5 per 1,000 live births

Maternal mortality

17 per 100,000 live births

Maternal mortality is where America falls furthest behind its income group: 17 deaths per 100,000 against Norway's 1 and a peer-group median near 4.

Years lived with chronic illness

Healthy life expectancy, and the years spent alive but unwell

The standard measure is healthy life expectancy (HALE) and the gap between total life expectancy and HALE — the years a person is alive but in poor health.

A trap in this metric

Ranked raw, "fewest sick years" is topped by Somalia, Lesotho and the Central African Republic — because people there die before chronic illness accumulates. The gap grows mechanically with longevity, so it only means anything when read within countries that already live long.

Read that way: among the 46 countries with life expectancy of 78 or more, the US has the second-most sick years (12.46, just behind Australia's 12.50). But Australia converts that into 70.6 healthy years, because it lives to 83.1.

Healthy years and sick years

35 advanced nations, ordered by healthy years · solid = healthy life expectancy, outlined = years lived in poor health

Healthy years (HALE) Years lived in poor health United States

America's bar is short at the healthy end and long at the sick end at the same time. It is second-from-last on healthy years while carrying nearly the largest burden of unhealthy ones.

America gets 63.9 healthy years — 34th of 35 advanced nations. It is not simply dying earlier. It is spending more of a shorter life sick.

References

Every source used on this page · switch style, then copy individually or all at once