Life expectancy in England reached an all-time high in 2025, with men living on average 80 years and women nearly 84 years, according to provisional ONS figures analyzed by the King's Fund (The Guardian). Those national gains, however, were overwhelmingly concentrated in the south, widening a regional divide that has now reached striking proportions.

London saw life expectancy rise by nearly a year over the decade to 2023–25, with the south-east, south-west, and east of England also recording gains. Five regions to the north and Midlands — the north-west, north-east, Yorkshire and the Humber, West Midlands, and East Midlands — experienced little or no rise over the same period. The King's Fund found that people in London can now expect to live three years longer than those in the north-east. That regional gap mirrors longstanding deprivation patterns: in the most deprived 30% of areas in England, life expectancy either fell or did not improve over the past decade, while it rose by half a year in the least deprived 30%.

At local authority level, the disparities are sharper still. Life expectancy in Blackpool was 10 years shorter for men and 8 years shorter for women than in Hart, Hampshire. The King's Fund has previously noted that for any given level of deprivation, life expectancy in the north of England is lower than in the south (The King's Fund) — meaning the penalty of living in the north persists even after accounting for economic conditions.

The ONS underpins these findings through its Single Year Life Tables dataset, which tracks period life expectancy (a snapshot of mortality rates at a given time, rather than a forecast for individuals) by age and sex from 1980 onward. Each table draws on population estimates, births, and deaths for a single year, with separate editions published for the UK, Great Britain, England and Wales, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. The most recent edition covers 2024; the 2025 figures cited by the King's Fund are provisional.

Beyond total life expectancy, the data on healthy life expectancy — the number of years lived in good health — is arguably the more consequential finding. Healthy life expectancy fell in all regions of England in the decade to 2022–24. People now spend on average about 2.5 years longer in poor health. The regional divide in healthy life expectancy has held steady at roughly six to seven years, but between the most and least deprived areas it can reach 20 years. A population living longer but spending more of that additional time in ill health raises direct questions for NHS capacity, social care demand, and labour market participation — pressures that fall disproportionately on the regions least equipped to absorb them.

The UK government's 10-year NHS plan includes a commitment to increase healthy life expectancy for everyone in England while halving the gap between the richest and poorest. The King's Fund called that halving goal "unrealistic," a judgment grounded in the trajectory of the data: healthy life expectancy has moved in the wrong direction across all regions, and the deprivation gap has shown no narrowing. Setting a target that requires reversing a decade-long, nationally uniform decline while simultaneously compressing a gap that has been structurally persistent places the policy ambition well beyond what the current evidence base supports.

Veena Raleigh, a senior fellow at the King's Fund, commented on the data, framing the findings within the broader debate over health inequalities and the feasibility of the government's stated targets. The King's Fund's longer-run analysis has tracked these gradients across multiple years, and its earlier reporting identified the south-east as having the highest life expectancy and the north-east the lowest, with a three-year gap between them — a pattern the 2026 figures confirm rather than disrupt.

The broader context here is that three trends are converging at once: a national headline that reads as progress, a regional distribution that undermines that progress, and a healthy-life-expectancy measure moving uniformly backward. Any strategy aimed at narrowing health gaps must contend with the fact that the levers most commonly cited (NHS service redesign, prevention initiatives, social care reform) operate within a landscape where the underlying determinants of health have been diverging for at least a decade. The government's targets assume a degree of policy traction that the data does not yet substantiate.

What the King's Fund analysis makes clear is that England's longevity story is not one story. It is at least two: a southern trajectory of measurable, if modest, gains, and a northern and Midland trajectory of stagnation and, in the most deprived communities, outright decline. The record-high national figure conceals the extent to which those gains are spatially and economically rationed.