The 25 US counties with the longest life expectancy revealed
If you want to live well into your eighties, you should consider moving to Colorado.
Data shows eight of the top 10 provinces for life expectancy are in the rocky mountain state.
But the leader in life expectancy is actually Alaska’s Aleutians East Borough, a 3,000-strong fishing community whose residents regularly live past 100. It is followed by Mono County, California, where people also live beyond triple digits.
The list of 25 counties reflects longevity data from 2018 to 2020 collected by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute’s County Health Rankings & Roadmaps program.
Most of the included states have many rural areas. And while the top 25 counties varied in population size, the top scorers on the list were smaller
It is a series of rankings compiled each year by a team of the University of Wisconsin which measures vital health factors including high school graduation rates, obesity, smoking, unemployment, access to healthy foods, the quality of air and water, income inequality and teenage births in nearly every county in America.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also measures life expectancy annually, but rely on preliminary death counts based on death records.
The rankings show how long a person born today can expect to live. Counties where people lived the longest were in Alaska, California, Colorado, South Dakota, Virginia, North Dakota, Montana, Texas, Wyoming, Washington, Florida and Utah.
They were published last week by US news and world reports.
Overall life expectancy in the US has taken a major hit in recent years, attributed to Covid, the rising fentanyl epidemic and gun violence.
Today, the average American can live to be about 76 years old, the lowest age since 1996 and behind much of the developed world.
Most counties bucking the trend are in states with rural areas, which often translates to cleaner air and sometimes even less stress than urban areas.
Researchers at the University of Louisville discovered in 2021 that people who live in more green environments can expect a healthier and longer life.
They followed more than 5 million cancer patients for 13 years, and their findings indicated that people who lived in greener counties lived longer than people in urban areas.
The Aleutian East Borough includes the southwestern peninsula of Alaska and parts of the Aleutian Islands.
The fishing community has been home to Aleut Native Alaskans since the last Ice Age. aapproximately 37 percent of residents are Alaskan Native people.
The province is largely remote and commercial fishing dominates the economy there. It has had an above-average lifespan for many years. Life expectancy increased between 1980 and 2014 by more than 18 percent.
Summit and Pitkin counties in Colorado regularly rank high in life expectancy.
With relatively high median household incomes ranging from $90,000 to $101,000 a year and reliable access to health care, people can expect to live past age 94.
Overall, Colorado counties took places three, four, five, 10, 16, 17, 21, and 22.
Even the lowest scorer on the list, Arlington County, Virginia, had an average life expectancy years longer than the national average, about 85 years versus 78 years overall.
The top 25 counties varied in population size, but the top scorers on the list were smaller.
Taking the no. In second place was Mono County, California, the fourth least populous county in the state with an average life expectancy of 101 years.
Stanley County in South Dakota, with a population of about 3,000, ranked sixth with an average life expectancy of 91 years, followed by Manassas Park, Virginia, whose residents can expect to live to an average age of more than 86 years.
Aleutians West Census Area, Alaska, about 550 miles southwest of the top-rated Aleutian East Borough, took eighth place with a life expectancy of about 91.5 years, while ninth place went to Golden Valley County, North Dakota, where less than 1,800 people live there.
Eagle County, Colorado, home to some of the most popular ski resorts in the US, rounded out the top 10. There, people can expect to live well past their 91st birthday.
Most of the remaining counties on the list, with few exceptions like Arlington in Virginia, lean more rural, though it’s hard to find a common thread between all the places.
Alaska and North Dakota, both well represented on the list, are among the top spenders of healthcare per person in the US, although that does not necessarily translate into better health care.
Socioeconomic factors, a combination of poverty, income, educational attainment, unemployment rates, and race all come together to dictate the makeup of a county and how healthy it is.