The Office for National Statistics published premature mortality rates for adults aged 18 to 74 in England and Wales on Tuesday, split by ethnicity, qualification, NS-SEC and deprivation.
The release, issued at 9:30am by the National Statistician’s Analysis Unit, covers all-cause premature mortality by ethnic group, highest qualification, National Statistics Socioeconomic Classification and deprivation quintile.
The accompanying dataset is the March 2021 to December 2023 edition, with the same age range and breakdowns.
The ONS has covered the same period before, in a bulletin on geographical inequalities in premature mortality released on 8 July 2025. That analysis defined premature mortality as dying from any cause before the 75th birthday.
It linked usual residents of England and Wales counted at Census 2021 to death registrations from 21 March 2021 to 7 December 2023.
The bulletin reported a linkage rate of 94.6 per cent, or 54.6 million linked person records, and a study population of 38.1 million.
After adjusting for age and sex, it found rates for adults aged 18 to 74 ranging from 285 per 100,000 person-years in Richmond upon Thames to 696 per 100,000 in Blackpool.
The relative range between the highest and lowest local authorities fell from 144 per cent to 129 per cent after adjusting for ethnicity and being born outside the UK.
It fell to 56 per cent when socioeconomic status was also included, which the ONS said suggested that socioeconomic status accounts for a considerable proportion of geographical inequalities.
The period falls within the coronavirus pandemic, and the ONS has said mortality rates for it will have been affected by both the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic. It urged users to take that into account when reading the estimates.
In the earlier analysis, the share of the Census 2021 population included in the linked cohort was lowest among males, people aged 20 to 29 and people from ethnic minority groups.
Because of the linkage process, that analysis did not include all death records, and the ONS said it was intended to show relative differences rather than absolute rates.
The ONS also said the analysis could not be used to infer cause and effect between area of residence and premature mortality.
A separate ONS bulletin on avoidable mortality, released on 28 April 2025, gives wider context for deprivation gaps. It found around one in five deaths in 2023 were considered preventable or treatable, at 21.6 per cent in England and 22.7 per cent in Wales.
In England, the avoidable mortality rate for the most deprived decile was 3.9 times that of the least deprived decile for males and 3.5 times for females. In Wales, the most deprived quintile’s rate was 2.7 times the least deprived quintile’s for both sexes.
Avoidable mortality rates in both countries in 2023 were still higher than in 2019, before the pandemic.