The death rate in the United States returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2024 as Covid-19 fell out of the top 10 leading causes of death, according to a report published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Covid-19 quickly rose to the third leading cause of death in the US in the first two years of the pandemic, pushing the age-adjusted death rate up to a peak of about 880 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2021. The overall US death rate has fallen about 18% since then, and last year’s 4% drop brought the US death rate down to the lowest it’s been since 2019. There were 722 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2024 – nearly 3.1 million deaths overall – according to the provisional, age-adjusted data from the CDC. Final mortality data may change, but the latest data are based on 99.9% of all 2024 death records received and processed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics as of June 1, 2025. And despite an unprecedented drop in 2024, drug overdoses and other unintentional injuries were the third leading cause of death in the US for the third year in a row. Covid-19 was the fourth leading cause of death in 2022 and the tenth in 2023, according to CDC data. There were still tens of thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the US last year, but suicide moved up to the tenth leading cause of death – with nearly 49,000 lives lost in 2024. Suicide mortality reached a record high in the US 2022 and has decreased only slightly in the years since. Millions of people have called, texted, or sent chats to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline since mid-2022; about a tenth of those individuals who reached were routed to a specialized subnetwork for LGBTQ+ youth, but the Trump administration ended that service in July. Death rates decreased for most age groups in 2024, the new CDC report shows, but held steady for children ages 5 to 14 and for infants.