New Study Has Plenty to Say on Wealth and Longevity

What effect does wealth have on longevity? The answer to that question is more complex than you might expect, and it turns out that your location has more to do with it than the balance of your bank account. This week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study that explored the connection between wealth and mortality in the United States and Europe. Among its conclusions? “Across all participants, greater wealth was associated with lower mortality,” the study’s authors wrote. But where someone lives can make a big difference.

The paper’s authors examined a group of 73,838 people between the ages of 50 and 85 who took part in studies of aging in the United States and Europe. The researchers then sorted the participants by wealth and analyzed the data on the 13,802 study participants who died within a 10-year period.

Perhaps the largest takeaway from the study is that wealthy Americans’ longevity doesn’t measure up to that of their European counterparts. “There was no evidence of a difference in survival between the wealthiest participants in the United States and the poorest participants in northern and western Europe in each follow-up year,” the study’s authors wrote.

That wasn’t the only way in which Americans stood out within the study. “The poorest participants in the United States appeared to have worse survival than all comparator groups, including the poorest quartile in all three European regions,” they added. Later in the paper, the researchers also state outright what you might have inferred from these earlier findings: “the United States had the widest gap in mortality between the bottom and top wealth quartiles.”

Are We Talking About Health and Longevity All Wrong?

When living longer isn’t always living better

Concerns over income and wealth inequality are a significant political issue in the United States, and — according to a 2025 Ipsos survey — played a role in the 2024 presidential election. As this new study makes clear, though, wealth inequality has implications beyond the economic and political realms; it also has a significant bearing on health and longevity.