Average Lifespan of an NFL Player

An average age at death for NFL players could be computed in only one way: take the players who have died and average their ages. That number would mostly describe players from the early decades of the league, because many players who debuted in recent decades are still alive. It would also change every year as more players die. Researchers avoid it for that reason. They follow a defined group of players over a defined period and count deaths, and then compare the observed deaths with the number expected in a comparison group of the same age and background. The results are reported as ratios, such as a standardized mortality ratio or a hazard ratio, where a value of 1 means the same rate as the comparison group.

The comparison group is the choice that matters most. Comparing players with the general population is easy, but the general population includes people who are ill or disabled and could never have played professional football, so players start with an advantage. Researchers call this the healthy worker effect. Comparing players with other athletes, or with players who had very short careers, removes part of that advantage.

The oldest line of research compares players with the general population and finds that players live longer. A 2006 study of 1,512 professional football players who debuted before 1940 found that they lived an average of 6.1 years longer than age-matched men from the general public, with a standard deviation of 11.9 years. The study also found that longevity rose with career length, from an average of 5.5 years longer for players who played one season to 6.7 years longer for players who played four or more. The authors read this as support for the healthy worker effect.

The most recent study, and the largest of those quoted here, points the same way on overall mortality. It followed 19,824 players who debuted between 1960 and 2019 and played at least one regular-season or postseason game. Together they contributed 518,833 person-years of follow-up, and 1,994 of them had died. The players had a lower all-cause mortality ratio than the general population, 0.70 with a confidence interval of 0.67 to 0.74, which means about 30 percent fewer deaths than expected for men of the same age, race and calendar year. The same study reported a higher neurodegenerative mortality ratio, 3.94, and it is covered below.

A 2018 systematic review reached a similar conclusion across earlier work. Of 801 studies identified, nine met its criteria, and overall the risk of all-cause and cause-specific mortality was lower among NFL players than among the general male population of the United States. The review also noted that methodological issues, including the healthy worker effect, prevented a definitive conclusion.

A better comparison group is another set of professional athletes. A 2019 study compared 3,419 NFL players and 2,708 Major League Baseball players, all with at least five playing seasons, over the period from 1979 to 2013. There were 517 deaths in the NFL group, at a mean age of 59.6 years, and 431 in the MLB group, at a mean age of 66.7 years. After adjusting for race and decade of birth, NFL players had a higher all-cause mortality hazard, 1.26 times that of the baseball players, with a confidence interval of 1.10 to 1.44. The ratio was 2.40 for cardiovascular disease and 2.99 for neurodegenerative disease. In the authors' illustration, among 1,000 players of each sport followed to age 75 there would be 21 more deaths among the football players, together with 77 more deaths that had cardiovascular conditions among their causes and 11 more that had neurodegenerative conditions.

The two studies do not conflict. One compares players with everyone, and the other compares them with another group of healthy, athletic men. Football players have lower mortality than the general population and higher mortality than baseball players.

A third design compares real players with replacement players. A 2018 study in JAMA followed 3,812 men who debuted between 1982 and 1992: 2,933 career NFL players and 879 replacement players who were hired to play during a three-game players' strike in 1987. The career players had a median tenure of five seasons and the replacement players of one. By the end of 2016, 144 career players, 4.9 percent, and 37 replacement players, 4.2 percent, had died. The adjusted hazard ratio for career players against replacement players was 1.38, with a confidence interval of 0.95 to 1.99, so the difference was not statistically significant. The authors noted that the number of deaths was small and that longer follow-up may be informative.

Position changes the picture. A 2023 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences made two comparisons: players who debuted in 1986 or from 1988 to 1995 against a sample of similar men in good health, and men drafted in the 1950s, of whom 906 played and 459 never played a game in a professional league. Unlike most earlier research, both analyses found that linemen died earlier than otherwise similar men, while men who played other positions died no earlier, and no later, than similar men. The authors argued that earlier results may have come from flawed research design.

Other work points to body size. The systematic review found that players at power positions, nonwhite players and players with a playing-time body mass index of 30 or more were associated with elevated all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. A 2009 review in the American Journal of Medicine reported that heavier former linemen had a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease than an age- and sex-matched reference population, with more obesity, lower HDL cholesterol and the metabolic syndrome. The page on the average weight of NFL players shows how large that size difference is: the offensive linemen on active rosters average 315 pounds, 121 pounds more than kickers.

A 2021 study of 9,049 players who entered the league between 1970 and 2017 looked at how old a player was when he first played. Controlling for position, body mass index, year of entry, birth year and draft round, each additional year of age at entry was associated with a 14 percent lower hazard of death, with a hazard ratio of 0.86 and a confidence interval of 0.74 to 0.98. The increased hazard appeared to be concentrated in the quarter of players who entered youngest, between 20.2 and 22.3 years old. The authors set the result against earlier research on head impacts in young players, and the study itself reports an association, not a cause.

The studies that report results by cause of death, in 2026 and 2019, found more neurodegenerative deaths among football players, even where overall mortality was lower than in the comparison group. In the 2026 cohort, the neurodegenerative mortality ratio was 3.94, with a confidence interval of 3.38 to 4.56. The ratio was 4.55 for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, 3.80 for dementia of any cause and 3.88 for Parkinson's disease. Because lower mortality from other causes can make neurodegenerative deaths a larger share of the total, the authors ran a simulation of competing risks, and it showed that this effect alone would raise the expected ratio by a factor of 1.30. After the adjustment, the residual ratio was 3.04, with a confidence interval of 2.63 to 3.50. The 2019 comparison with baseball players found a ratio of 2.99 for neurodegenerative disease, and the absolute number of excess neurodegenerative deaths in that study was still small.

One more complication runs through all of these studies. A longer career means a player survived the early seasons, and a longer career is also more exposure. A 2019 analysis of 6,408 players who had died by July 1, 2018 found that the association between age at death and the number of seasons played was positive beginning at about 10.7 seasons. The authors said that earlier research that does not account for this survivorship bias may not describe mortality risk well. How rare long careers are is shown on the page on the average career length of an NFL player: in the roster data, 8.8 percent of players reached ten seasons.

These studies describe groups. They say nothing about how long any one player will live, and they do not give a single age at which the average player dies. The open nflverse tables used elsewhere on this site list active seasons but no dates of death, so a lifespan figure cannot be computed from them, and this page does not offer one. The studies also cover different eras, from players who debuted before 1940 to players who debuted in 2019, and the league, its medicine and its players' bodies have all changed over that time.

Every figure on this page is quoted from the abstract of the study named, as listed in PubMed:

• EClinicalMedicine 2026
• JAMA Network Open 2019
• JAMA 2018
• PNAS 2023
• Research in Sports Medicine 2006
• IJERPH 2021
• The 2018 systematic review
• The 2019 F1000Research analysis
• The 2009 American Journal of Medicine review

The page reports what the authors reported and does not add conclusions of its own. The studies listed are those found in PubMed up to the date above. More football pages are collected on the NFL hub.