The age-adjusted U.S. death rate in 2025 was 689.2 per 100,000 people, the lowest CDC has reported, according to provisional data cited by HHS. The U.S. death rate 2025 figure is 4.6% below the final 2024 rate of 722.1.
HHS’s own analysts put the comparable drop at about 2%. Their report says the 4.6% compares two years built on different Census population estimates. Using the same estimates for both years, the decline is 14.1 per 100,000, and the 2025 rate is 689.8. That decline is less than half the headline figure.
What Drove the 2025 Decline in Deaths
The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, known as ASPE, published the report on Oct. 27. Its authors are Stephen Murphy, Nicholas Holtkamp and Eric Sun. On the like-for-like basis, four causes account for 87% of the decline: unintentional injuries at 30%, COVID-19 at 28%, cancer at 18% and heart disease at 11%.
Drug overdoses explain most of the injury decline. Overdoses account for about 73% of the 4.23per-100,000 drop in unintentional-injury deaths, and nearly all of that comes from deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone. Those unintentional deaths fell from 45,917 in 2024 to 36,406 in 2025, a drop of 9,511 or about 20.7%.
Opioid Prescribing and Treatment Numbers
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the findings in Detroit on Oct. 27. The department’s release compares March 2026 with March 2015 after adjusting for population. Opioid prescriptions dispensed stand at 45.3% of the 2015 level, and the total opioid dosage dispensed stands at 35.2%.
The number of patients filling retail prescriptions for buprenorphine or naltrexone, medications used to treat opioid use disorder, stands at 218% of the 2015 level. Kennedy said, “President Trump has attacked the opioid crisis from every direction.” The release credits federal policies, including the 2018 SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act and the 2025 reauthorization, for the first drop in drug-related deaths in nearly three decades.
Kathryn Burgum, an HHS senior advisor and co-chair of the Great American Recovery, an effort the administration established in January 2026 to align federal prevention, treatment and recovery programs, framed the work around the people and families behind the numbers.
The ASPE authors describe what changed without assigning causes to specific policies. The report also says the 2025 data are provisional and that the lowest-on-record claim covers only 2020 through 2025, because comparable population estimates for earlier years do not exist. For some suppressed national age-and-cause cells, the authors assigned a midpoint value of five deaths. Final 2025 mortality data and revised population estimates are needed to confirm the figures.
