The Human Mortality Database


Vladimir Shkolnikov, Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Magali Barbieri, Associate Director

University of California, Berkeley and INED, Paris

John Wilmoth, Founding Director

United Nations and formerly University of California, Berkeley



A 6th HMD Symposium is organized in Paris, France, on June 16-17, 2022, to celebrate the database 20th anniversary. See announcement here

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the HMD team decided to establish a new data resource: Short-term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF) data series. Objective and internationally comparable data are crucial to determine the effectiveness of different strategies used to address epidemics. Weekly death counts provide the most objective and comparable way of assessing the scale of short-term mortality elevations across countries and time. Here we provide weekly death counts for 38 countries: Austria, Australia (Doctor certified deaths), Belgium, Bulgaria, Chile, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, England and Wales, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and the USA. The same data in the pooled CSV file are available for download here. Data formats and methods are described in the STMFNote. We also strongly recommend reading the metadata text. Following the HMD practice, we also publish original input data in standardized format. During the next few weeks data will be frequently updated and new countries will be added.

The STMF data is published under a CC-BY 4.0 License. The most recent STMF update is: 2022-06-07.

New: We invite you to explore this data with our online STMF visualization toolkit.

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgements). The Center on the Economics and Development of Aging (CEDA) French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) have also supported the further development of the database in recent years.

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 38 countries or areas:

Australia

Estonia

Japan

Slovakia

Austria

Finland

Latvia

Slovenia

Belarus

Germany

Lithuania

Spain

Belgium

Greece

Luxembourg

Sweden

Bulgaria

Hong Kong

Netherlands

Switzerland

Canada

Hungary

Norway

Taiwan

Chile

Iceland

Poland

U.S.A.

Croatia

Ireland

Portugal

Ukraine

Czechia

Israel

Republic of Korea

Denmark

Italy

Russia

For more information, please begin by reading an overview of the database. If you have comments or questions, or trouble gaining access to the data, please write to us (hmd@mortality.org).