The Human Mortality Database


John R. Wilmoth, Director

University of California, Berkeley

Vladimir Shkolnikov, Co-Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research


We have recently upgraded the HMD web site. The new site presents the same information but offers features that should be useful for both data users and our web administrator. From the user's point of view, the most important changes are: (1) a more logical organization of the information on individual country pages, and (2) the ability to download large chunks of the database in zipped data files (see link on the sidebar of this page).

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity. The project began as an outgrowth of earlier projects in the Department of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany (see history). It is the work of two teams of researchers in the USA and Germany (see research teams), with the help of financial backers and scientific collaborators from around the world (see acknowledgements).

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 37 countries or areas:

Australia

Finland

Lithuania

Spain

Austria

France

Luxembourg

Sweden

Belarus

Germany

Netherlands

Switzerland

Belgium

Hungary

New Zealand

Taiwan

Bulgaria

Iceland

Norway

U.K.

Canada

Ireland

Poland

U.S.A.

Chile

Israel

Portugal

Ukraine

Czech Republic

Italy

Russia

Denmark

Japan

Slovakia

Estonia

Latvia

Slovenia

For more information, please begin by reading an overview of the database. If you have comments or questions, or trouble gaining access to the data, please write to us (hmd@mortality.org).