The Human Mortality Database


Vladimir Shkolnikov, Director

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Magali Barbieri, Associate Director

University of California, Berkeley and INED, Paris

John Wilmoth, Founding Director

United Nations and formerly University of California, Berkeley


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). The Center on the Economics and Development of Aging (CEDA) French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) has also supported the further development of the database in recent years.

We seek to provide open, international access to these data. At present the database contains detailed population and mortality data for the following 39 countries or areas:

Australia

Estonia

Japan

Slovakia

Austria

Finland

Latvia

Slovenia

Belarus

France

Lithuania

Spain

Belgium

Germany

Luxembourg

Sweden

Bulgaria

Greece

Netherlands

Switzerland

Canada

Hungary

New Zealand

Taiwan

Chile

Iceland

Norway

U.K.

Croatia

Ireland

Poland

U.S.A.

Czech Republic

Israel

Portugal

Ukraine

Denmark

Italy

Russia

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).