A person born in Brazil in 2022 was expected to live, on average, up to 75.5 years of age. For men, life expectancy was of 72.0 years old, and for women, of 79.0 years old. Estimates indicate that life expectancy fell from 76.2 years of age in 2019 to 74.8 in 2020, to reach 72.8 in 2021. The indicator decrease reflected the rise of deaths related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2022, the probability of a newly-born die before one year of age, that is, the infant mortality rate, was 12.9 for each 1,000 births, of which 13.9 were for men and 11.7, for women.

Life expectancy at 60 was 21.9 years for the total population in 2022. Life expectancy at this age for men was 20.0 years and for women, 23.5 years.

This information is available in the Complete Life Tables for Brazil - 2022, released today (November 29) by the IBGE, including life expectancies of exact ages up to 90 years of age, for Brazil. This information is used as one of the parameters to calculate the social security factor for retirement pensions under the General Social Security System.

The IBGE annually disseminates the Life Tables relative to the previous year. Between 2011 and 2021, the Complete Life Tables released came from a projection of mortality prepared from the Tables calculated for the year in which the 2010 Population Census was carried out.  Whenever a Population Census takes place and new information about deaths is available, the IBGE redesign the country’s Life Tables, as it is a necessary exercise to update this demographic model, which summarizes the population's mortality level.

The Life Tables designed for 2022 used direct data on deaths (adjusted for under-registration) and the census population in 2022 to calculate mortality rates.  Therefore, the results reflect the mortality of the Brazilian population, by age, in a year that still saw an increase in deaths compared to the period before the Covid-19 pandemic. Such increase is reflected upon the life expectancy at birth of 75.5 years of age.

That means a newly-born in the year 2022 is expected to live, on average, 75.5 years, in case they undergo the same mortality levels the population of 2022 had at each age bracket. The same logic can be applied to the life expectancies at any age.

Death data used in this survey were the death records from the  Information System on Mortality (SIM), made available by the  Ministry of Health, reviewed by under-registration rates. Population data obtained by means of the 2022 Census were also used, by sex and age (results from Universe).

In a brief analysis of death evolution, there is a gradual increase in the records of overall number of deaths in Brazil throughout the decades of 2000s and 2010s, from less than 1 million deaths recorded in 2000 to nearly 1.349 million in 2019.

In 2020, as a consequence of the sanitary crisis that affected the country and the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a significant increase i the absolute number of recorded deaths, from 1.556 million to reach the extreme point in 2021, of 1.832 million deaths. In 2022, there is decrease in the absolute value of recorded deaths, to 1.542 million, still a high rate in relation to the pre-pandemic trend.

The  infant mortality rate calculated by the ratio between the recorded and reviewed deaths and the live births (also reviewed) indicates that at each 1,000 live births, 12.9 faced death before 1 year of age in 2022.

The following years should feature, on the one hand, the increase in deaths as a reflex of population aging. On the other hand, there should be a reduction of the death surplus among the elderly due to the weakening of the Covid-19 effects.

In the following table, there is an overview of life expectancy for Brazil, from 1940 to 2022. In the period, the indicator increased by 30.0 years, 29.1 for men and 30.7 for women.

In 2024, the 2022 Life Tables for the Federation Units of Brazil should also be published, providing input for population projections by Federation Unit. Thus, as in the case of Brazil, it will be important to assess for each Federation Unit the effect of adjusting mortality rates on population and death data throughout time. In order to do so, information from the Population Census that is not currently available, such as internal migration estimates and the results of the 2022 Census Post-Enumeration Survey, will be used as well.