Countries Where Women Live the Longest (2023 Data)

Among women born in 2023, those in Monaco can expect to live 88.5 years, those in Hong Kong 88.1, and those in Japan 87.1, according to World Bank estimates. The world average for women that year was 75.8 years. The spread is wide: in Nigeria, female life expectancy is estimated at 54.7 years, nearly 34 years below Monaco.

This ranking shows the top 20 places for women's longevity, the gender gap country by country, and the reasons the leaders lead. For the combined figure covering both sexes, see Countries with the Highest Life Expectancy.

Key takeaways

• Female life expectancy at birth was highest in 2023 in Monaco (88.5 years), Hong Kong (88.1), Japan (87.1), and San Marino (87.1), per World Bank data.
• Among countries with more than a few million people, Japan, Spain (86.7), and South Korea (86.4) lead the field.
• The global gap is about five years: 75.8 years for women against 71.0 for men in 2023.
• The gap is narrowest where men live long (Netherlands 3.0 years, Norway 3.1) and widest where men die young (Russia 10.7, Belarus 9.6).
• Long lives are not the same as healthy lives. Japanese women's healthy life expectancy was 75.45 years in 2022, about 11.6 years below their life expectancy.

Which countries have the highest female life expectancy?

The table below lists the 20 highest values in the World Bank's 2023 series. It includes territories and microstates such as Monaco, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar, because the data set does. Small populations produce unstable averages, so the list is better read as a set of tiers than as a strict podium.

Rank	Country or territory	Female life expectancy, 2023
1	Monaco	88.5 years
2	Hong Kong SAR, China	88.1 years
3	Japan	87.1 years
4	San Marino	87.1 years
5	Liechtenstein	86.9 years
6	Spain	86.7 years
7	French Polynesia	86.5 years
8	South Korea	86.4 years
9	Gibraltar	86.1 years
10	Andorra	86.1 years
11	Macao SAR, China	86.1 years
12	Switzerland	86.0 years
13	Bermuda	85.7 years
14	France	85.7 years
15	Israel	85.5 years
16	Italy	85.4 years
17	Portugal	85.3 years
18	Singapore	85.3 years
19	Puerto Rico (US)	85.2 years
20	Malta	85.2 years

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, "Life expectancy at birth, female (years)," 2023 values (retrieved October 2026). Values rounded to one decimal; ties in the rounded figure are listed in the order the source returns them.

Just below the cut are Australia (85.1), Luxembourg (85.0), Sweden (85.0), Slovenia (84.9), Ireland (84.6), Norway (84.6), Belgium (84.5), Greece (84.4), and Finland and Iceland (both 84.3). Austria is at 84.2, Canada at 83.9, and the United Kingdom at 83.2. The United States, at 81.1, is roughly six years behind Japan.

Worth knowing: Japan's own health ministry put Japanese women's life expectancy at 87.33 years for 2025, the 41st year in a row that Japanese women ranked first among the countries in its comparison, according to a July 2026 report of the ministry's figures. South Korea (86.6) and Spain (86.53) followed.

That ministry comparison and the World Bank series differ because they cover different sets of places and different years. The ministry compares Japan against a short list of large countries and leaves out microstates and Hong Kong. This is the main reason you will see "Japan first" in one source and "Monaco first" in another. Neither is wrong, and the useful question is always: first among what?

How is female life expectancy measured?

Life expectancy at birth is a statistical summary, not a promise. It answers one question: if a newborn girl faced, for her whole life, the death rates that every age group experienced this year, how long would she live on average? Demographers call this a period life expectancy.

Think of it as a snapshot of a river taken from a bridge. It tells you how fast the water is moving today, at every point along its length, and it combines those speeds into one number. It does not tell you how fast any particular drop of water will travel, because the river itself will change between now and the sea. A girl born in 2023 may well live longer than 2023's period figure if death rates keep falling, or shorter if they rise.

Why do the numbers move around between sources?

Three things cause the differences you see across websites. First, the reference year: a 2021 figure includes the COVID-19 mortality shock, and a 2023 figure mostly does not. Second, the producer: national statistics offices, the UN Population Division, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Bank each apply slightly different smoothing and estimation methods, especially where death registration is incomplete. Third, the geography: whether Hong Kong, Monaco, and other small jurisdictions are counted as countries.

The COVID-19 dip is visible in the global series. World Bank estimates put female life expectancy at 75.3 years in 2019, 74.8 in 2020, and 73.7 in 2021, before recovering to 75.5 in 2022 and 75.8 in 2023. A two-year setback of that size, followed by a full rebound, is unusual in the modern record.

What does "at birth" hide?

Life expectancy at birth is pulled down by deaths in infancy and childhood, which is why countries with high child mortality score so low. A woman who survives to 65 in a poor country can expect to live much closer to the rich-country figure than the birth number suggests. For that reason, researchers who want to compare older-age health often use life expectancy at 65 or 80 instead, which isolates the effect of the health care system and lifestyle on adults.

How big is the gap between women and men?

Women outlive men in nearly every country with reliable data. In 2023 the global figures were 75.8 years for women and 71.0 for men, a gap of 4.8 years, according to World Bank estimates. Our World in Data, using UN figures for 2021, reports a five-year gap (73.8 versus 68.4 years) and stresses that the gap is "not a constant": it varies across countries and has changed over time.

The table below pairs the female figure with the male figure for a selection of countries, all from the same World Bank series and year. The gap column is the simple difference between the two.

Country	Women, 2023	Men, 2023	Gap
Hong Kong SAR, China	88.1	82.5	5.6
Japan	87.1	81.1	6.0
Spain	86.7	81.3	5.4
South Korea	86.4	80.6	5.8
Switzerland	86.0	82.4	3.6
France	85.7	80.1	5.6
Italy	85.4	81.4	4.0
Portugal	85.3	79.5	5.8
Singapore	85.3	81.0	4.3
Australia	85.1	81.1	4.0
Sweden	85.0	81.7	3.3
Norway	84.6	81.5	3.1
Finland	84.3	79.0	5.3
Netherlands	83.4	80.4	3.0
Germany	83.5	78.7	4.8
United Kingdom	83.2	79.4	3.8
United States	81.1	75.8	5.3
Lithuania	81.9	72.9	9.0
Latvia	80.6	70.5	10.1
Belarus	79.1	69.5	9.6
Russian Federation	78.7	68.0	10.7

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, female and male life expectancy at birth, 2023 (female series; male series). Gaps computed from the rounded values.

Read the table by columns, not only by the gap. Switzerland has one of the smallest gaps among rich countries (3.6 years), but not because Swiss women die early. Swiss men, at 82.4 years, are among the longest-lived men on Earth. Likewise Japan has a larger gap than the other top-ranked large countries in the table, partly because Japanese women are so far ahead and partly because Japanese men, at 81.1, are good but not best in class.

That observation matters because it corrects a common misreading. A narrow gap is often described as a sign of gender equality in health. The table suggests a plainer explanation in many cases: it is a sign of low male mortality. Where men drink heavily, smoke heavily, die in accidents, or have poor cardiovascular care, the gap balloons, as it does in Russia, Belarus, and the Baltic states.

Same news, different cause: Switzerland's small gap and Japan's large gap are both good news for women. The difference is mostly about men: Swiss men live 1.3 years longer than Japanese men, while Swiss women live 1.1 years less than Japanese women.

Why do women live longer than men?

There is no single cause, and researchers disagree about how to split the credit. Our World in Data's review of the literature describes a chain of contributions that changes across a lifetime. Boys are more likely than girls to be born prematurely, to be stillborn, and to die in the first week of life. In young adulthood, men have higher death rates from accidents, violence, suicide, and poisoning. In middle and older age, men have higher death rates from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, which the review links in part to smoking, alcohol, drug use, and occupational hazards.

Historically, the gap grew through the twentieth century and has narrowed in recent decades in many countries. Research cited by Our World in Data (Janssen 2020; Luy and Wegner-Siegmundt 2015) ties the rise and fall of the gap to the rise and fall of smoking, which was far more common among men. For France, the country its long-run chart covers, the same source attributes roughly half of the gap before 1900 to differences in infant mortality, which today contributes little.

Biology plays a role too. Having two X chromosomes may protect women from some genetic disorders, because a single faulty copy on one X can be offset by the other, while men have only one X. Women also have higher rates of autoimmune diseases, a reminder that the female advantage in mortality comes with trade-offs in morbidity. It is a defensible summary that women hold a biological edge, behavior widens it, and social conditions can erase it.

How much each factor contributes is unsettled. The sex-gap literature points to what researchers call the health-survival paradox: women live longer but report more disability and illness along the way. That paradox has no single agreed explanation, and the question of how much comes from biology versus behavior remains open.

Where is the female advantage smallest or reversed?

Our World in Data notes that in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Iran, male life expectancy was higher than female until recently, partly because girls once faced higher infant mortality than boys. In Nigeria, the gap in 2021 was under two years. These cases suggest that the "women always live longer" rule depends on conditions: where girls receive the same food and care as boys and childbirth is survivable, the female advantage appears. Where they do not, it can shrink or vanish.

Why does Japan lead among large countries?

Japan's lead is the product of several slow-moving advantages rather than one secret. It is easy to find confident lists of "reasons," so it is worth separating what is documented from what is folklore.

What is documented: universal insurance and low obesity

Japan reached universal health insurance coverage in 1961, when virtually the entire population became covered by social health insurance plans, as described in Wikipedia's overview of healthcare in Japan. A single national fee schedule applies to almost all plans and providers, and the system is split across many separate insurance plans.

Japan also has one of the lowest obesity rates among wealthy countries, and the OECD's Health at a Glance series tracks the gap with countries such as the United States and Mexico. Obesity is a major driver of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, so the gap in body weight is a plausible contributor to the gap in life expectancy.

What is plausible but less certain: diet and social ties

The traditional Japanese diet, with fish, vegetables, soy, and rice and little red meat, is often credited for low heart-disease mortality. The evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, and it is a mistake to treat any single food as the cause. Dietary patterns correlate with income, education, and health care access, all of which independently affect mortality. Studies of Japanese migrants who move to Western countries and adopt local diets are sometimes cited as evidence for diet, but those studies also change the migrants' health care system, workplace, and neighborhood, so they cannot isolate diet cleanly.

Social connection is also frequently cited. Isolation is associated with higher mortality in many studies, but the direction of causation is difficult to establish, because sick people withdraw from social life. Treat claims about "ikigai" (a Japanese concept of having a reason for being) as an interesting cultural idea, not as an established mortality factor.

How much does the local picture vary?

National averages hide a lot. Japan's own prefectural figures from the national mortality database show female life expectancy in 2023 ranging from 88.14 years in Shimane Prefecture to 85.55 in Aomori, a spread of about 2.6 years inside one small, wealthy country. Within the European Union, Eurostat's regional data for 2022 range from 87.7 years for women in the Madrid region to 74.4 in Mayotte, a French overseas department, against an EU average of 83.3 years for women. A country's rank tells you about its typical woman, not about every region.

How did South Korea go from the middle to the top?

South Korea is the most dramatic climber on the list. World Bank estimates put Korean female life expectancy at 56.3 years in 1960, 70.4 in 1980, 79.7 in 2000, and 86.4 in 2023. In 1960 a Korean woman could expect to live about 14 years less than a Japanese woman (70.2 years). By 2023 the gap was 0.7 years.

Year	Japan, women	South Korea, women	Spain, women	France, women	United States, women
1960	70.2	56.3	71.7	73.3	73.1
1980	78.8	70.4	78.5	78.2	77.4
2000	84.6	79.7	82.5	83.0	79.3
2019	87.5	86.3	86.7	85.9	81.4
2023	87.1	86.4	86.7	85.7	81.1

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, female life expectancy at birth, selected years (retrieved October 2026).

Two features of this table deserve attention. The first is the United States, which started in 1960 close to the European leaders (73.1 years, level with France's 73.3) and has fallen steadily behind, ending 2023 at 81.1. The second is Spain, which in 1960 was slightly behind the United States and now sits ahead of France and 5.6 years ahead of America.

Korea's catch-up came with institutional change. The country's national health insurance began in July 1977 with employees of large firms, expanded to rural residents in 1988, and achieved universal coverage on July 1, 1989, within 12 years, according to a 2012 review in the Journal of Korean Medical Science. The review credits strong political will, fast economic growth, and a gradual, financially cautious rollout. The lesson is not that insurance alone explains the rise; income, nutrition, sanitation, vaccination, and falling smoking in women all moved at the same time. It is that the rise was fast enough to be visible within a single generation.

What is happening in Spain, France, and Italy?

Spain, France, and Italy cluster near the top for women: 86.7, 85.7, and 85.4 years in 2023. The "Mediterranean diet" gets most of the credit in popular coverage, and there is a large research literature on the diet, but a diet is not a country. Spain's gain since 1960 (71.7 to 86.7, a rise of 15.0 years) coincided with democratization, the build-out of a universal public health system, rapid income growth, and a fall in infant mortality.

Long-range forecasts of who will lead carry wide uncertainty, and none made before 2020 could anticipate the pandemic. For women alone, the 2023 World Bank gap between Japan (87.1) and Spain (86.7) is 0.4 years, small enough that year-to-year noise could reorder them.

France shows a feature common in southern and western Europe: a large gender gap (5.6 years) despite high overall life expectancy. French men, at 80.1 years, trail Swiss men by 2.3 years and Italian men by 1.3. Heavy alcohol and tobacco use among men in earlier decades are the usual suspects, and the pattern lines up with the smoking-based explanation of the gap's history.

What about the Nordic countries?

Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland sit between 84.3 and 85.0 years for women, which puts them below Japan, Spain, and Switzerland but well above the United States. What distinguishes them is the small gap: 3.3 years in Sweden and 3.1 in Norway. Finland is the outlier in the group, with a gap of 5.3 years, because Finnish men, at 79.0, live 2.5 to 2.7 years less than Swedish and Norwegian men.

The Nordic profile shows up again in an interesting way. Because men live long there, these countries have fewer widowed women in older age groups than countries with large gaps, which affects living arrangements, poverty risk, and caregiving in old age. Life expectancy gaps are not only a health statistic. They shape who ends up alone, who cares for whom, and what pension systems must cover.

What do the low end and the middle of the table look like?

At the other end of the scale, World Bank estimates for 2023 include Nigeria at 54.7 years for women, Chad at 57.0, the Central African Republic at 59.3, Lesotho at 60.0, and Sierra Leone at 63.5. These are not tweaks of the rich-country pattern. They reflect a different set of risks: infectious disease, malnutrition, high child mortality, and pregnancy and childbirth complications.

The WHO's maternal mortality fact sheet estimates that about 260,000 women died of pregnancy-related causes in 2023, a global ratio of 197 deaths per 100,000 live births, with around 70% of deaths (about 182,000) in sub-Saharan Africa. The global ratio has fallen by about 40% since 2000, which is real progress, but the regional concentration shows where women's life expectancy is still held down by causes that wealthy health systems have largely eliminated.

Other large countries sit in between. China's women live 80.9 years, Turkey's 79.9, Brazil's 79.0, Mexico's 77.8, and India's 73.6, all in 2023 World Bank estimates. Russia, at 78.7 for women, is in a peculiar position: its women live about as long as Brazil's or Turkey's, while its men, at 68.0, live closer to the average for low-income countries. That difference is the 10.7-year gap in the table above.

Do longer lives mean healthier lives?

Not automatically. Japan is a good example because its health ministry publishes both numbers. For 2022, Japanese women's life expectancy was 87.09 years and their healthy life expectancy (the period a person can live without needing nursing care or being restricted in daily life) was 75.45 years, a difference of 11.63 years. For men, the figures were 81.05 and 72.57, a difference of 8.49 years, according to figures reported by Nippon.com.

Two details stand out. First, women have a longer total life but also a longer stretch of limited health, which is the health-survival paradox in numbers. Second, a summary of the ministry's data notes that healthy life expectancy and overall life expectancy have risen at nearly the same pace since 2001, so the extra years have not, on net, been added at the unhealthy end.

This matters for how to read the rankings. A country with high female life expectancy and a long period of dependency faces heavy pressure on caregiving and long-term care. A rank in the table is a measure of mortality, not of quality of life. For a broader view of living conditions, see Best Countries to Live In: Quality of Life Index, and for how health systems compare, Countries With the Best Healthcare Systems.

The biology of aging itself sets a backdrop. Our explainers on why we age and the hallmarks of aging describe the cellular processes that rankings of this kind cannot capture, and longevity interventions: what actually works reviews what the evidence supports so far. Neither a table nor a diet will tell you where a particular person lands.

What the rankings cannot tell you

Life expectancy tables are easy to misuse. Five cautions apply to everything above.

• Microstates are noisy. Monaco, San Marino, Gibraltar, and Liechtenstein have populations in the tens of thousands or fewer, so a handful of deaths changes the average. They deserve less weight than a country of 50 million.
• Who lives there matters. In small jurisdictions, the resident population may differ from the native-born population, for example through migration of wealthier or healthier people, so the average may reflect selection rather than a health system.
• Period is not cohort. The numbers describe 2023 death rates, not the lives girls born in 2023 will actually live.
• Correlation is not a recipe. Countries at the top share universal health coverage, low poverty among older adults, and low smoking. These facts are associations. They do not prove that copying a single policy or diet will produce the same result.
• Registration quality varies. Rich countries record almost every death. In others, estimates rely on surveys and models, and the error bars are wide.

For more demographic context, Countries With the Most Centenarians Per Capita shows how longevity at the extreme tail differs from average life expectancy, Countries With the Oldest Populations ranks median age, and Countries with the Lowest Infant Mortality shows the early-life piece of the story. Smoking, a major driver of the gender gap, is covered in Countries with the Highest Smoking Rates.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Which country has the highest female life expectancy? A: It depends on how you count. In the World Bank's 2023 series, Monaco (88.5 years) and Hong Kong (88.1) are first and second, with Japan third at 87.1. Among large countries, Japan leads; Japan's health ministry reported 87.33 years for 2025 and described it as the 41st straight year at the top of its comparison list.

Q: Why do women live longer than men in almost every country? A: Researchers point to a mix of biology and behavior. Boys have higher death rates from birth onward, men have higher death rates from accidents, violence, and suicide in young adulthood, and from heart disease and stroke later. Smoking, alcohol, and hazardous work historically widened the gap. Experts still disagree on how much each factor contributes.

Q: What is the difference between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy? A: Life expectancy is the average number of years a person is expected to live. Healthy life expectancy is the average number of years lived in good health, without serious limitation. In Japan in 2022, women's life expectancy was 87.09 years and healthy life expectancy 75.45 years, a gap of about 11.6 years.

Q: Which country has the biggest gap between women's and men's life expectancy? A: Among the countries compared here, Russia, with 78.7 years for women and 68.0 for men in 2023, a gap of 10.7 years. Latvia (10.1 years), Belarus (9.6), and Lithuania (9.0) follow. Our World in Data reports gaps above 10 years for Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in 2021.

Q: Where is the gender gap smallest? A: Among high-income countries, the Netherlands (3.0 years), Norway (3.1), Sweden (3.3), and Luxembourg (3.3) show some of the smallest gaps in the 2023 data. Nigeria also had a gap of under two years in 2021, according to Our World in Data, in a setting where overall mortality is high for both sexes.

Q: Has female life expectancy always been rising? A: Over the long term, yes, but with setbacks. World Bank estimates put global female life expectancy at 53.0 years in 1960 and 75.8 in 2023. It fell from 75.3 in 2019 to 73.7 in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic before recovering to 75.8 by 2023.

Q: Is the United States far behind? A: In 2023 American women's life expectancy was 81.1 years, about six years behind Japan (87.1) and 5.6 years behind Spain (86.7). In 1960 the figure was 73.1, close to France (73.3), so the divergence took place over decades rather than overnight.

The takeaway

The headline number, 87 to 88 years for women at the top, hides three more useful findings. The leaders are a mix of large countries and tiny jurisdictions, and the mix changes the ranking, so always ask what is being compared. The gender gap is mainly a story about men: where men live long, as in Switzerland and the Nordic countries, the gap shrinks, and where they die young, it balloons. And a long life is not automatically a healthy one, as Japan's 11.6-year gap between life expectancy and healthy life expectancy for women shows.

The strongest lesson from the long series is about speed. South Korea moved from 56.3 to 86.4 years in six decades, while the United States went from near the top to well behind. National outcomes are not fixed, and they move on timescales of a generation, not a century.

Sources

• World Bank, World Development Indicators: female life expectancy at birth, 2023, male life expectancy at birth, 2023, and world series 1960 to 2023.
• Our World in Data, Why do women live longer than men?
• Nippon.com, Japan Data: healthy life expectancy and life expectancy, 2022, reporting Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare figures.
• The Star (Malaysia), Women top last year's global life expectancy rankings, July 26, 2026.
• Moon TJ, "Light and Shadows of the Korean Healthcare System," Journal of Korean Medical Science, 2012.
• Eurostat, Higher life expectancy at birth for women in all EU regions.
• World Health Organization, Maternal mortality fact sheet.
• Wikipedia, List of Japanese prefectures by life expectancy, for prefecture values drawn from the Japanese Mortality Database.

Related reading

• Countries with the Highest Life Expectancy (Ranked)
• Best Countries to Live In: Quality of Life Index (2025)
• Countries With the Highest Cost of Living
• Countries With the Youngest Populations (2025)
• Countries With the Oldest Populations, Ranked by Median Age