2026 Updates: A New Life Expectancy Metric, New Feature, and Updated Data!
The Congressional District Health Dashboard is excited to announce its April 2026 data release! This release furthers our mission to provide actionable, reliable, and nonpartisan congressional district health data to policymakers and users from diverse sectors. The release includes:
A new Life Expectancy metric
An updated District Density Scale tool
New years of data for 25 metrics
New Metric
Life Expectancy
The Congressional District Health Dashboard is excited to introduce our new Life Expectancy metric, which captures average Life Expectancy at birth at the congressional district level. Data are available for each year from 2019 – 2023, and users can find demographic breakdowns by race, ethnicity, and sex. The Dashboard team calculates this measure with data from the National Vital Statistics System.
Life Expectancy is an important measure of health and well-being. It reflects the combined influence of socioeconomic conditions, access to health care, neighborhood environments, policy, individual behaviors, and other factors. This totalizing measure of health status helps users assess differences across geographies.
This is the second Life Expectancy metric available on the Dashboard. The other metric, now called Life Expectancy - Census Tract-Level, 2015, provides census tract-level data from 2015.
New Feature
District Density Scale
The newly published District Density Scale is an improved version of the Dashboard’s previously available District Density Index. This updated resource categorizes congressional districts according to household density per square mile in the congressional district in question, to help users understand where their district lands on a scale that ranges from Predominantly Rural to Predominantly Urban. Users can access their District’s Density Scale information on the Districts Facts page. Learn more about the District Density Scale here.
New Years of Data
The Dashboard is excited to add new years of data for 25 metrics. This includes 10 metrics from the National Vital Statistics System and 10 from CDC’s PLACES Project, which now reflect data collected through 2023. The updates also include new Medicaid Enrollment data, through 2025 Q2 and Q3. See below for a full list of metrics with new years of data.
The Latest in Trends
Life Expectancy Over the Years
Life Expectancy in the U.S. decreased across nearly all groups between 2019 and 2021, reflecting impacts of COVID-19. But by 2022 and 2023, life expectancy began to increase.
Disparities persist by race and ethnicity. In 2023, life expectancy among the Asian population was approximately 87 years, compared to about 75 years among the Black population, a difference of over ten years.
Explore these data in your district and state!
Life Expectancy by District Density
Using the new District Density Scale, our team explored how life expectancy varies across the urban-rural spectrum. In 2023, there was a five-year gap between the Predominantly Rural and Predominantly Urban categories.
Learn more about the District Density scale here.
Important Data Updates
Updated Calculations
As part of this data release, we updated how we calculate our mortality metrics for earlier years to improve accuracy. As a result, metric estimates for these years may differ from what was previously shown on the site. For more information about these calculation updates, please refer to the technical document, or contact us.
Mortality Metrics Racial Breakdowns
Due to changes in the way the Census assigns race beginning in 2020, some people are assigned to different race categories before and after 2020, which may impact metric estimates. This change most highly impacts the Other racial and ethnic group. Please reach out to [email protected] with any questions.
Missing Data
Due to insufficient data collection, 2023 estimates are missing for all CDC PLACES Project metrics in Kentucky and Pennsylvania. Due to changes in data collection, 2023 Food Insecurity estimates for state and congressional districts are missing for the following 9 states: Colorado, Florida, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming.
