Life Expectancy at Birth in Pakistan: 1800 to Today (and Tomorrow)

Life expectancy at birth measures how many years a newborn could expect to live, given the mortality of the time and place. For Pakistan, the story across three centuries is a statistical fact about the lives actually lived there. In the 2020s, life expectancy at birth in Pakistan stands at 66.3 years — ranking #118 of 157 countries. This metric captures the heavy weight of infant and adult mortality, reflecting the fragile biological margins of human populations across generations.

The historical arc traces a long, agonizingly slow baseline before a modern acceleration. In the 1800s estimate it was 24.54, ticking downward decade by decade through the 1810s estimate 24.42, the 1820s estimate 24.31, the 1830s estimate 24.19, the 1840s estimate 24.08, the 1850s estimate 23.96, the 1860s estimate 23.85, the 1870s estimate 23.74, the 1880s estimate 23.62, the 1890s estimate 23.51, and reaching a trough in 1900 it was 23.39 years. From there, gradual gains took hold through the 1910s estimate 25.68, the 1920s estimate 27.97, the 1930s estimate 30.26, the 1940s estimate 32.55, the 1950s 34.84, the 1960s 40.52, the 1970s 46.21, the 1980s 51.89, the 1990s 55.52, the 2000s 59.15, and the 2010s 62.72. Projections extend this upward trajectory into the future through the 2030s projection 67.5, the 2040s projection 68.7, the 2050s projection 69.9, the 2060s projection 71.1, the 2070s projection 72.3, the 2080s projection 73.5, the 2090s projection 74.7, and the 2100s projection 75.9.

What it meant to be born in earlier centuries was to face an immense brevity of days, where the horizon of old age was a statistical rarity. If you were born at the turn of the twentieth century, your expected lifespan was constrained by the harsh realities of historical mortality rates. Today, newborn horizons stretch significantly further, yet the global ranking of #118 of 157 countries reveals just how much distance remains to be traveled.

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