Across the UK, healthy years vary far more than lifespans.

Two measures, two different pictures.

Across the 216 UK councils for which the Office for National Statistics publishes both measures in its annual series, healthy life expectancy at birth ranges by 22.0 years for men and 24.0 years for women. Life expectancy across the same councils ranges by 9.1 and 8.4 years. The difference between places in years of good health is far wider than the difference in years of life. It concerns not only how long lives last but how much of them is lived in the kind of health that lets people work, walk, care for family and get about. Lifemap was built to make that difference visible.

For most of the twentieth century, the story told about health inequality in Britain came down to a single number. Life expectancy — the average number of years a newborn would live if the death rates of the time persisted — was a clean, useful measure that national statisticians could produce reliably and journalists could explain in a paragraph. It rose for most of the last century, then stalled in the 2010s. And it varies, as it always has, between richer and poorer parts of the country.

What that story misses is what happens inside the years themselves. Two places can differ modestly in how long people live and much more in how many of those years are spent in good health. The difference between the two figures — life expectancy minus healthy life expectancy — is the number of years lived in poorer health.

On these figures, people born in the UK would live, on average, 60.7 years (men) and 60.9 years (women) in good health. Life expectancy at birth is 79.2 years for men and 83.0 for women, so the average expected time in poorer health is 18.5 years for men and 22.1 for women. Those national averages conceal wide differences between places.

The two measures answer different questions. Life expectancy answers: how long. Healthy life expectancy answers: how long in good health. ONS builds the second figure by combining death rates at each age with survey answers: people taking part in the Annual Population Survey rate their own general health. Because that survey's sample has shrunk, the February 2026 release estimates the share of people in good health with a statistical model rather than reading it directly from the responses; ONS describes this as an interim method. It is a self-reported measure, which brings caveats, but it is the closest thing to a national barometer of how years are actually lived.

Seen council by council, the years lived in poorer health change the shape of the map.

Look up your area.

Before going further, it helps to have a familiar place in mind: where you live, where you grew up, or where you work.

Two English councils, side by side.

Consider two councils in England: Blackpool, which has the lowest healthy life expectancy of any English upper-tier or single-tier council, and Richmond upon Thames, which has the highest. In both cases the ranking uses the average of the published figures for men and women; the panels show each sex separately.

Men in Richmond upon Thames can expect to live 9.0 years longer than men in Blackpool, on average, but 18.4 more years in good health. For women the figures are 7.7 and 18.5 years. The difference in the quality of life is wider than the difference in its length.

This is arithmetic, not rhetoric. Men in Blackpool are expected, on average, to spend 22.8 years in poorer health; in Richmond upon Thames, 13.4. That 9.4-year difference, added to the 9.0-year difference in life expectancy, gives the 18.4-year difference in healthy life expectancy. Fewer years in total, and more of them spent in poorer health.

The same pattern appears when England's neighbourhoods are grouped by deprivation rather than by council. In ONS figures for 2022–2024, men living in the most deprived tenth of neighbourhoods can expect 49.8 years in good health, against 69.2 for men in the least deprived tenth. For women the figures are 48.2 and 68.5 years. ONS puts the difference at 19.5 years for men and 20.3 for women (ONS calculates it before rounding, so it can differ by a tenth from the figures above).

The pattern is not confined to one pair. Across the 216 councils, those with lower life expectancy tend also to have more years in poorer health. Healthy life expectancy runs from 50.9 years in Blackpool to 72.9 in the Orkney Islands for men, and from 50.1 in Merthyr Tydfil to 74.1 in the Orkney Islands for women. Figures for councils with small populations carry wide margins of error, so the exact top and bottom places are less certain than the overall range. The methodology explains how to read the confidence intervals.

Why this gap exists.

There is no single cause of the gap in healthy years, and any honest account has to say so. What public-health research suggests, with varying degrees of confidence, is that three broad forces are involved.

The first is accumulated disadvantage. Deprivation, measured in household income, education, housing quality, job security and the stresses that come with each, is one of the strongest predictors of the onset of chronic illness. People who grow up and live in deprived areas develop cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, respiratory illness and musculoskeletal conditions earlier, on average. These are the conditions that pull healthy life expectancy down long before they shorten life expectancy: a person can live with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for many years, and those years count as years in poorer health rather than years lost. The 2010 Marmot Review and its 2020 follow-up, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On, described this pattern; the follow-up found that improvement in life expectancy had stalled and that the time people spend in poor health had increased.

The second force is the geographical clustering of behaviours that affect health. Smoking, low physical activity, poor diet and heavy drinking are not evenly spread across the country. They cluster, often in places with fewer economic alternatives and thinner public-health services. In England, the share of adults who smoke ranges from 3.2% in Woking to 20.8% in Boston, against 10.9% for England as a whole (Annual Population Survey, 2022–24; these are survey estimates, and those for smaller councils have wide margins of error). Rates of overweight and of physical activity vary widely too. These behaviours are not moral failings assigned to a postcode; they respond to the conditions a place provides — its food environment, its streets, its stop-smoking services. Each of these shapes how common chronic conditions are by middle age.

The third force is access to healthcare and early detection. An illness caught early usually costs fewer healthy years. Screening programmes, cardiovascular risk checks, diabetic eye checks and mental-health support in primary care all reduce the time people spend in poor health. Access to them is uneven: waiting lists, GP appointment availability and the distance to a specialist all vary by region, and the variation tends to be least kind to the areas that already carry the heaviest burden.

It is worth being precise about what those paragraphs claim. These are patterns observed at area level. They describe what is true, on average, of people living in a given council area. Lifemap does not and cannot predict individual outcomes. It shows what public data says about places, not about people. Two people on the same street will have very different lives, shaped by family history, occupation, luck and many factors that no open dataset can see.

What this isn't.

Because the statistic is striking, and because the site is interactive, it is worth being explicit about what Lifemap will not do.

That last point is as much a design decision as a legal one. A site that discusses health, ageing and mortality at the level of a postcode has to work hard to avoid the worst instincts of the category. The easiest way to do that is structural: don't collect what you cannot responsibly hold, don't show what you cannot responsibly publish, and make the methodology plain enough that anyone who wants to check the numbers can.

The data.

Lifemap is built entirely from public data. The figures in this article come from the sources below, and you are welcome to read them at the source.

The data has limits, and Lifemap tries to be open about them. Healthy life expectancy for all 216 upper-tier and single-tier councils comes from one ONS release covering 2022–2024; Lifemap’s previous figures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were for 2016–2018. ONS’s annual healthy life expectancy series does not cover English districts, so their pages show the county's figure, labelled as the county's, alongside ONS’s separate census-based estimate for the district, which is not comparable with the annual series. Council estimates carry wide confidence intervals because the survey sample in any one council is small. Lifestyle figures are published for every council in England, Scotland and Wales, with a few exceptions (Ribble Valley for smoking; Cumberland, Hammersmith and Fulham, North Northamptonshire, Rutland, West Northamptonshire and Westmorland and Furness for drinking over 14 units), though drinking is published only at county and unitary level in England, and the surveys and periods differ by nation. Northern Ireland's lifestyle figures are published only for its 5 Health and Social Care Trusts, so Lifemap shows them as trust figures, never as council figures. Where a figure is not published, Lifemap says so rather than guessing.

We think that is the minimum standard for a public-data project. If the data cannot support a statement with reasonable confidence, the site should say so.

The dataset is built from open public data and is itself free to reuse under the Open Government Licence v3.0, provided the original sources are acknowledged.

Compare two areas.

The clearest way to see the gap is side by side. The Lifemap homepage has a comparison tool that shows life expectancy, healthy life expectancy and years in poorer health for two places at once. Try the place you grew up and the place you live now.

What we hope people take away.