Life expectancy in Finland climbed to a record high level last year, according to figures released on Tuesday by Statistics Finland.
The provisional life expectancy at birth for children born in 2024 was 79.6 years for boys and 84.8 years for girls, the agency said.
This represents an increase of 0.6 years for girls and 0.7 years for boys, compared to the life expectancy level in 2023.
The latest figures are part of a long-term trend which has seen life expectancy steadily increase in Finland. For example, in 1994 the life expectancy at birth for girls was 80.1 and for boys 72.8.
Last year, a total of 58,267 people died in Finland, a drop of about 5 percent on the figure for 2023.
However, despite this fall in the number of deaths, the agency's senior statistician Joni Rantakari noted that the mortality rate is still relatively high.
"With the exception of the two previous years [during the Covid pandemic], the last time the number of deaths was over 58,000 was some 80 years ago, in 1944. That was during the war years, and 62 percent of the dead were men," Rantakari said.
Birth rate drops to historical low
A separate report published by Statistics Finland on Tuesday revealed that Finland's birth rate is now at a historically low level.
"The total fertility rate for 2024 was 1.25, which is the lowest birth rate since statistics compilation started in the year 1776," the agency's report said.
The rate was especially low in some of Finland's bigger cities, with Tampere and Turku both seeing fertility rates of 1.06 over the three years from 2021 to 2024.
In addition, Statistics Finland noted that nearly one-in-five children born in Finland last year were born to foreign-language speaking mothers.
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