Leading causes of death
NCHS's count and age-adjusted rate of deaths by state for the ten leading underlying causes of death, including suicide, drawn from death certificates.
Figures
Count
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NCHS - Leading Causes of Death: United States. Data period 2017. Published .
Pages built on this dataset
Publisher
- Organization
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Publisher’s dataset
- NCHS - Leading Causes of Death: United States
- File or API used
- https://data.cdc.gov/resource/bi63-dtpu.json
- Methodology
- https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/mortality_tables.htm
Coverage
- Geography
- States, the District of Columbia and the nation
- Time coverage
- 1999-2017
- Update frequency
- Annual (discontinued; not extended past 2017)
- Published
- 2019
- Retrieved
- September 25, 2026
- License of the records
- Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
- Rows
- 19,760 observations, 1999-2017
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths by leading cause | Number of deaths from one of the ten leading underlying causes of death. | count |
| Age-adjusted death rate by leading cause | Deaths from one of the ten leading underlying causes of death per 100,000 residents, age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population. | per 100k |
Caveats
- This file ends in 2017 and NCHS has not published a newer state-level version of it; CDC's WONDER tool has more recent mortality data but does not offer a state-level figure through an interface this site can pull from automatically, so these figures are not updated past 2017.
- The age-adjusted rate removes the effect of a state's age mix so states can be compared; it is not the rate a resident of that state actually experienced, which the raw death count and the state's population reflect instead.
- Each death is coded to exactly one underlying cause by the state that certified it, so these ten causes do not overlap and, apart from rounding, sum to all deaths from these causes; they do not sum to all deaths from every cause, since causes outside the leading ten are not included here.
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “NCHS - Leading Causes of Death: United States”, compiled from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NCHS - Leading Causes of Death: United States. Retrieved September 25, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/cdc-leading-causes-of-death/.
Cite Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .