While life expectancy has increased in all OECD countries over the past half century, progress was stalling in the decade prior to the COVID‑19 pandemic, and many countries experienced outright drops in life expectancy during the pandemic. In 2021 life expectancy at birth was 80.3 years on average across OECD countries (Figure 3.1). Japan, Switzerland and Korea led a large group of 27 OECD member countries in which life expectancy at birth exceeded 80 years. A second group, including the United States, had life expectancy between 75 and 80 years. Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and the Slovak Republic had the lowest life expectancy among OECD countries, at less than 75 years. Provisional Eurostat data for 2022 point to a strong rebound in life expectancy in many Central and Eastern European countries, but a more mixed picture for other European countries, including reductions of half a year or more in Iceland, Finland and Norway.