How long can humans live? We may not have hit the limit yet

The record for the maximum human lifespan has been unbroken since the 1990s, but that might soon change, according to a new way of analysing mortality records

By Clare Wilson

29 March 2023

Older people who are alive today may have benefitted from advances in medicine after the second world war

Maliutina Anna/Shutterstock

While human life expectancy has been rising for decades in most countries, the record for the longest-lived person hasn’t been increasing – but that might be about to change.

Using a new way of analysing mortality records, figures from 19 high-income countries suggest that we haven’t yet approached the maximum human lifespan and could see the record start to rise in the next few decades. “We don’t appear to be approaching a maximum limit at the moment,” says the study’s lead researcher David McCarthy at the University of Georgia in Athens.

The longest-lived person in history is recorded as Jeanne Calment, who died aged 122, although there have been recent doubts about her authenticity.

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Since Calment’s death in 1997, the record for the oldest living person has been held by people aged between 110 and 120 – and it hasn’t nudged upwards over time. This has led scientists such as Jan Vijg at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York to conclude that there is probably a biological limit on the maximum human lifespan, which he puts at about 115 years old.

But the latest findings suggest that the maximum human lifespan will soon start rising as people born in the first few decades of the 20th century reach very old age.

McCarthy’s team came to this conclusion after studying the age at death of people in various countries in Europe, plus the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, taken from the Human Mortality Database, a record of global birth and death statistics.