IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

MAP: How long people in your city are expected to live

An analysis of government data shows how race and class can shape how long you live.
Illustration of a range of people's shadows creating a bar chart on a map of the United States.
Cathryn Virginia / for NBC News

In America, money and education can mean the difference between a long life and an early death, and these differences can play out street by street.

With a statewide average of 81.3 years, California’s 35-plus million residents enjoy the second-highest life expectancy in the United States (at an average 82 years, Hawaii residents live the longest). In wealthy suburbs, though, lifespans stretch longer.

Take suburban Los Angeles. In one section of Palos Verdes Estates, where the median income is $175,536 and 98 percent of the population graduated from high school, the expected lifespan is 86.4 years.

Eleven miles away in a section of Long Beach near Interstate 710, the median income is $54,167, less than a third of Palos Los Verdes. Twenty-one percent of the population didn't finish high school. Life expectancy in this area is 73.3 years, 13 years shorter than in Palos Verdes Estates.

These findings are part of an Associated Press analysis of new, detailed life-expectancy data from the National Center for Health Statistics. The life expectancy figures are specific to children born between 2010 and 2015. The analysis found strong relationships between income, education, health insurance coverage, racial segregation and life expectancy.

The analysis found that life expectancies:
  • Increased by six months with a $10,000 increase in median income.
  • Decreased by eighteen months with a 10 percent increase in unemployment.
  • Decreased by 10 months with a 10 percent increase in residents without a high school diploma.
  • Decreased by eight months with a 10 percent increase in the black population.

The NCHS used death records from 2010 to 2015 along with the Census Bureau’s decennial census and American Community Survey data to calculate lifespans specific to census tracts. Census tracts are statistical areas with populations of approximately 4,000 people that are sometimes equivalent to a city neighborhood, and sometimes larger. The data allows readers to see differences in life expectancy from place to place within their cities or towns.

Differences between adjacent areas can be striking. For instance, in North Carolina's Edgecombe County, tracts 213 and 203 are adjacent tracts with similar economic, educational and employment percentages.

But tract 213, with an expected lifespan of 82.2 years, is 30 percent black.

Tract 203 is 84 percent black and has an expected lifespan of just 74.7 years.

Overall, researchers at the NCHS found that of the tracts with the lowest life expectancy, about half have mostly black populations, 57 percent have low education and 61 percent have low incomes.

Use the map below to explore the life expectancies of census tracts in your area, and select an area to see more about it.

See more NBC News data graphics projects, including our map of sea level rise across the East Coast.