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Population aged 15 years and over rating their own health as bad or very bad, 2021: 8.9%
Population aged 15 years and over rating their own health as good or very good, by income quintile, 2021
– Highest quintile: 80.1%
– Lowest quintile: 58.3%
– Total: 67.8%
Life expectancy at birth, 2021: 82.4 years
Infant mortality, deaths per 1,000 live births, 2021: 3.6
Maternal mortality rate, deaths per 100,000 live births, 2020: 7.9
Congestive heart failure hospital admission in adults, age-sex standardized rate per 100,000 population, 2019: 287
Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease hospital admissions in adults, age-sex standardized rate per 100,000 population, 2019: 159
Adults aged 65 and over rating their own health as good or very good, 2021: 45%
Adults aged 65 and over rating their own health as poor or very poor, by income, 2021
– Lowest quintile: 25%
– Highest quintile: 10%
– Total: 17%
Limitations in daily activities in adults aged 65 and over, 2021
– Some Limitations: 25%
– Severe Limitations: 16%

Source: OECD (2023), Health at a Glance 2023: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris, doi.org/10.1787/7a7afb35-en.

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Life Expectancy at Birth, 2022: 83.23
Infant Mortality Rate, 2022 (per 1,000 live births): 3.30
Under-Five Mortality Rate, 2022 (per 1,000 live births): 3.91

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2023). Data Portal, custom data acquired via website. United Nations: New York. Accessed 12 May 2023.

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Life expectancy at birth, 2021: 81.9 years
Maternal mortality ratio (per 100,000 live births), 2020: 8
Under-five mortality rate (per 1,000 live births), 2022: 4
Neonatal mortality rate (per 1,000 live births), 2022: 3
New HIV infections (per 1,000 uninfected population), 2022: 0.09
Tuberculosis incidence (per 100,000 population), 2022: 7.2
Probability of dying between age 30 and exact age 70 from any of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, or chronic respiratory disease, 2019: 10.1%

Source: World health statistics 2024: monitoring health for the SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals: Statistical Annex. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2024. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO. Last accessed June 3, 2024.

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Neonatal Mortality Rate, 2021: 3
Infant Mortality Rate, 2021: 3
Under-5 Mortality Rate, 2021: 4
Maternal Mortality Ratio, 2020: 8

Note: “Under-5 mortality rate – Probability of dying between birth and exactly 5 years of age, expressed per 1,000 live births.
“Infant mortality rate – Probability of dying between birth and exactly 1 year of age, expressed per 1,000 live births.
“Neonatal mortality rate – Probability of dying during the first 28 days of life, expressed per 1,000 live births.”
“Maternal mortality ratio – Number of deaths of women from pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births during the same time period (modelled estimates).”

Source: United Nations Children’s Fund, The State of the World’s Children 2023: For every child, vaccination, UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight, Florence, April 2023.

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Maternal Deaths Per 100,000 Live Births, 2020: 8

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“In 2022, life expectancy at birth in France stood at 82.3 years, which is more than 1.5 years higherthan the average across the EU (Figure 1). It fell by 0.7 years in 2020 due to COVID-19 deaths – the biggest reduction since 1945 – and remained at the lower level in 2021 and 2022.

“As in other European countries, in France women tend to have a longer life expectancy than men. In 2022, French women could expect to live to 85.2 years – 5.8 years longer than men (79.4 years). This gender gap is greater than the EU average (5.4 years).”

Source: OECD/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (2023), France: Country Health Profile 2023, State of Health in the EU, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Brussels.

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“In 2020, the leading causes of death in France were cancer, circulatory diseases (such as stroke and ischaemic heart diseases) and COVID-19 (Figure 2). During the first year of the pandemic, COVID-19 accounted for about 69 000 deaths – over 10 % of all deaths – making it the third leading cause. Nearly 60 % of COVID-19 deaths in 2020 were among people aged 85 and over, which was the highest proportion among EU countries. The pandemic also disproportionately hit ethnic minority groups and people living in deprived areas.

“The broader indicator of excess mortality shows that the overall number of deaths in France in2020, 2021 and 2022 was substantially higher than in the previous five years (Figure 3).In 2020 and 2021, excess mortality was driven mainly by COVID-19 mortality. This was much less the case in 2022, when other factors including two bad flu seasons (one in March/April and another in December) and three heatwaves in the summer resulted in excess mortality (INSEE, 2023).”

Source: OECD/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (2023), France: Country Health Profile 2023, State of Health in the EU, OECD Publishing, Paris/European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, Brussels.

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“Life expectancy at birth has increased by almost five years since 1995 (Table 1.3), although it decreased by 0.5 years in women and 0.6 years in men in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. While it went up again in 2021, it did not reach its 2019 value (85.6 years for women and 79.7 for men). The French average life expectancy for women is the fifth highest in the world. Health-adjusted life expectancy was 64.6 for women and 63.7 for men in 2019 (Insee, 2021b), which is slightly higher than the EU mean (respectively 63.8 years and 63.4 years in 2018).

“Looking at causes of death, the leading causes in 2017 were cancer (28.4%), circulatory diseases (23.8%), symptoms, signs and abnormal clinical and laboratory findings, not elsewhere classified (9.8%), respiratory diseases (7.4%) and external causes (6.5%). This makes France one of the few countries in the EU where cancer kills more people than circulatory diseases. Suicide rates are also high in France compared to the EU average (13.2 vs. 10.5 per 100,000 population) (OECD, 2020a).

“The gender gap in life expectancy in France was 6.1 years in 2020, which is higher than the EU average of 5.6 years that same year. There are also geographic and socioeconomic variations: life expectancy is lower in the five overseas departments and regions, reaching its lowest in Mayotte (72.5 years for men and 73.9 for women). There are also differences associated with income, level of education and socioeconomic status. For example, during the 2012–2016 period there was a 13-year and 8-year difference in life expectancy between the 5% richest and the 5% poorest men and women, respectively (Insee, 2018).

“The premature mortality rate was almost twice as high in men compared to women in 2021 (239 per 100,000 inhabitants vs. 122). It is higher in the overseas departments and regions. Roughly 30% of premature deaths were deemed avoidable, and avoidable mortality was 3.3 times higher in men and 5.1 times higher in the overseas departments and regions in 2013 (DREES and Santé publique France, 2017). However, it has been decreasingly steadily in the past decades, at a faster rate in men.”

Source: Or Z, Gandré C, Seppänen AV, Hernández-Quevedo C, Webb E, Michel M, Chevreul K. France: Health system review. Health Systems in Transition, 2023; 25(3): i–241.

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World Health Systems Facts is a project of the Real Reporting Foundation. We provide reliable statistics and other data from authoritative sources regarding health systems and policies in the US and sixteen other nations.

Page last updated April 13, 2025 by Doug McVay, Editor.