South Korea Is About to Overtake Japan as the World's Longevity Leader

"If you want to live a long and healthy life, you'd be better off in South Korea than the United States." — CNN, Madeline Holcombe, 2026 May 16

Most people know that Koreans and the Japanese outlive just about everyone else. For a long time I didn't think the two belonged in the same sentence — which is exactly why Madeline's CNN piece caught my eye. It singles out Korea, specifically, as the country whose lifespans are climbing the fastest. Japan is full of people who live a long time, but its growth has flattened out. Korea is still moving.

Over the past 30 years, Korea’s rapid gains in life expectancy and healthspan stand out (yellow dotted line)

In an earlier post, I wrote about how easy it is to get a health checkup in Korea, and how that's part of the story behind our longevity. But I agree completely with Madeline that what's really driving the recent surge is everything working at once — diet, exercise, an active social life. A checkup catches something abnormal and points you to a specialist who treats it, and that adds years to your life. What it can't really do is make you healthier to begin with. That part comes from how Koreans actually live, day to day.

Underneath all of this, I think, are a couple of forces driving it.

• A sense of self-investment: Koreans don't hold back when it comes to investing in themselves — and it isn't a rich-person thing, it's mainstream. Smartphone adoption shot up almost overnight; so did LLM usage. Walk into a big dermatology clinic and half the patients are men.
• An ecosystem that delivers it fast: Korea has the manufacturing and technical muscle to keep pace with how fast that demand changes. K-beauty didn't happen in a vacuum — it rides on world-class cosmetics OEM/ODM makers, and on the med-tech companies that swapped in homegrown equipment across the country's dermatology clinics at remarkable speed.

Demand (self-investment) and supply (industry) will spin the cycle ever faster. My bet is that sometime after 2030, Korea's lifespan won't just catch Japan's — it'll leap well past it.

About the Author

Donkyo Seo
Co-founder & CEO, Himedi

For the past 9 years, Donkyo has helped international patients navigate Korean healthcare. Himedi is licensed by Korea's Ministry of Health & Welfare (License #A-2016-01-01-2345). 

Sources

• CNN — Madeline Holcombe, "Big lessons the US can learn from a country with one of the fastest-growing lifespans," May 16, 2026. cnn.com
• Lifespan — life expectancy at birth: UN, World Population Prospects 2024.
• Healthspan — healthy life expectancy (HALE): WHO, Global Health Observatory 2021.
• Life expectancy × HALE trajectories, 1990–2021: IHME, Global Burden of Disease 2021 (Japan endpoints per Lancet Public Health, GBD 2021).
• Chart scope: sovereign nations with population ≥ 10 million.