Life expectancy calculator: honest about being an estimate
ONS cohort baselines, evidence-weighted lifestyle adjustments (deliberately clamped: stacked risk factors overlap in real mortality data), and the number that matters for money: the plan-to age with the buffer planners add. The same model that sets the Hundred Summers app's horizon. Your figures never leave your browser.
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Worked example
Computed when this page was built by the same engine that runs the calculator above, so the figures below and the live tool can never disagree. Change any input above to see your own.
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| Age | 45 |
| Sex at birth | Male |
| Smoker | No |
| Alcohol | 8 units a week |
| Exercise | Moderate |
| BMI | 24 |
| Conditions | None |
| Household income | £20–60k |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| Estimated life expectancy | 90 |
| Healthy years to about | 73 |
| Plan to (with the planner's buffer) | 100 |
| Years of retirement from 67 | 23 |
The next question
How long would my money last? →Pension drawdown calculator
Or answer it with everything else: the full Hundred Summers plan connects your pay, pensions, savings, property, tax and spending year by year, and stress-tests them across 500 simulated market histories.
Read the guide
- Care home fees: the numbers nobody explains until it's urgent →What care actually costs, the £23,250 means-test line and when the home counts, why councils pay less than you would, and how to stress-test a plan against a late-life care phase.
A mid-point, not a deadline
Every life-expectancy figure is the middle of a wide distribution: about half of people outlive theirs, many by a decade. That's why the planning question is not "when will I die?" but "what horizon takes the worst case off the table?", and why the answer this page leads with is the buffered plan-to age, not the estimate itself. The cost of being wrong is asymmetric: plan long and you leave an inheritance; plan short and the money runs out at the age you are oldest and least able to work.
The adjustments are evidence-weighted and deliberately bounded: smoking, inactivity, diabetes and heart disease overlap heavily in real mortality data, so stacking them without a clamp manufactures false precision (this model also gives no longevity credit for alcohol; the protective J-curve is now considered an artefact). The full Hundred Summers plan uses this exact model to set your horizon, then tests whether the money survives it, including a longevity-stretched decade beyond.