US infant mortality falls to record low, but still lags peers

The United States reached its lowest recorded infant mortality rate in 2025, a milestone that sits uneasily beside the country’s continuing gap with other wealthy nations. Preliminary federal data put the rate at slightly fewer than 5.4 deaths per 1,000 live births, down from about 5.5 in 2024 and 5.6 in the two years before that.

The final 2024 data, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, show 20,048 infant deaths and a rate of 5.52 per 1,000 live births, essentially unchanged from 2023’s 5.61. The decline may look small, but researchers said it was statistically meaningful and likely represented hundreds of fewer infant deaths each year. One researcher described the improvement as an “encouraging data point,” while stressing that officials hoped the trend would continue.

The federal numbers also show how uneven that progress remains. In 2024, infants of Black non-Hispanic women had the highest mortality rate at 10.98 per 1,000 live births, compared with 4.41 for White non-Hispanic women and 3.72 for Asian non-Hispanic women. Across states, the rate ranged from 2.97 in New Hampshire to 9.65 in Mississippi, a spread that underscores how strongly geography still shapes survival in the first year of life.

Location matters well beyond state lines. CDC analysis covering 2021 through 2023 found that infant, neonatal and postneonatal mortality rates were higher in rural counties and in small and medium metropolitan counties than in large metropolitan counties. That pattern points to persistent differences in access to obstetric care, neonatal services and the broader health infrastructure families rely on before and after birth.

The latest data also show where some improvement has come from. The 2024 postneonatal mortality rate fell 4.6 percent, to 1.87 from 1.96 in 2023, while the neonatal mortality rate was essentially unchanged at 3.66. The CDC says U.S. infant mortality has fallen 21 percent since 2002, but the country still compares poorly with peers measured through Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development health indicators.

The global backdrop makes the stakes clearer. The World Health Organization says the first month of life is the most vulnerable period for child survival, with 2.3 million newborn deaths in 2022 and nearly half of all deaths among children under 5 occurring in the newborn period. Against that standard, the American decline is real progress, but it remains incomplete, shaped by race, region and access to maternal care.