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CDC / NCHS Mortality (National Vital Statistics System)

Death counts and mortality measures published by the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) through the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which compiles the death certificates filed by every U.S. state and jurisdiction. It is the source of the mortality figures in this Commons.

Publisher
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (NCHS) open_in_new
License
Public domain
Coverage
Base Data Commons graph
Updates
Yearly

Source & License

  • Publisher: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics; data flow from state vital-records offices through the National Vital Statistics System.
  • Access: Published via CDC WONDER and NCHS data releases; served into this Commons through the Google Data Commons base graph.
  • License: Public domain. A work of the U.S. Government, free to use and redistribute with attribution to CDC/NCHS.

Methodology

  • Registration-based: counts come from death certificates, a near-complete administrative record rather than a survey, so they are counts and not sample estimates.
  • Cause coding: underlying and contributing causes are coded to the WHO's International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10).
  • Provisional vs final: the most recent year is provisional and revised as late certificates arrive; earlier years are final.
  • Small-count suppression: to protect confidentiality, CDC suppresses or flags as unreliable death counts and rates below a small threshold (commonly fewer than 10 deaths) for a place-year, so some small areas show no value.

Coverage & caveats

  • Geographies: nation, states, and counties.
  • Counts, not rates, at the county grain: county-level all-cause death counts are available; age-adjusted rates and life expectancy are published for larger geographies and may not resolve at every county.
  • Suppression: small place-years may be blank by design (confidentiality), not because there were no deaths.

Variables (1)

VariableSource table
Number of deaths
Count of mortality event.
Population mortality eventMeasured countStatistic measured value
graph node
NVSS mortality (all causes)