Italians Can Expect Nearly 21 More Healthy Years Than Latvians

Years lived without limitation

Healthy life years measure how long a person born today could expect to live without limitation in everyday activities. It combines mortality with self-reported disability, so it is a measure of the quality of a lifespan rather than its length.

Across the EU in 2024 the figure was 65.2 years.

The Finnish contradiction

Finland records the highest mean life satisfaction in the Union at 7.8 out of 10, and 57.3 healthy life years — third from bottom, behind Slovakia and Latvia.

Two official European indicators, both drawn from the same survey framework, place the same country at opposite ends of the Union. That is worth stating clearly rather than reconciling, because the resolution is instructive: they measure different things and both are correct.

Satisfaction asks how someone feels about their life. Healthy life years count how much of it they expect to spend without activity limitation, and the disability component of that comes from a question about whether a respondent is limited in what they can do.

There is a further complication, and it is the same one that affects the satisfaction ranking. The limitation question is self-assessed, so cultural differences in how readily people report limitation feed directly into the result. A population willing to describe itself as limited will record fewer healthy life years without being less healthy.

The top

Italy records 73.4 healthy life years, the highest in the Union, with Malta at 70.6 and Greece at 69.9.

Bulgaria at 69.1 is the entry that resists a wealth-based reading. It has the lowest life satisfaction in the Union, one of its lowest income levels, and the fourth-highest number of healthy life years. It also has one of the Union's shorter life expectancies, which means Bulgarians report a large share of a shorter life as unlimited.

That combination is the clearest evidence available here that the indicator is not a straightforward measure of health system performance.

The bottom

Latvia records 52.5 years, nearly 21 fewer than Italy. Slovakia at 57.1, Finland at 57.3, Estonia at 58.6 and the Netherlands at 59.5 complete the group below 60.

The presence of Finland and the Netherlands in that group — two high-income Member States with well-regarded health systems — is the strongest single argument for reading this indicator with care.

How to use it

Healthy life years is valuable as a companion to life expectancy, because a country can extend life without extending healthy life and this measure detects that. It is unreliable as a cross-country league table of health, because the disability component rests on self-assessment that does not travel well between languages and cultures.

The comparison it supports best is within a country over time, and the comparison it supports worst is exactly the one a ranking invites.