Which month do the most Americans die: January, April, July or October?
January, by a clear margin. CDC final counts for 2010 to 2019 average about 250,000 deaths in January, against about 220,000 in April, 213,000 in July and 221,000 in October.
Turning the page
Picture a wall calendar on the last evening of December. You lift the page and a fresh grid appears, 31 empty squares, the same as it looked last year. Nothing on the paper says which squares will hold more. For that, you need ten years of records and some patient adding.
How we count
The numbers here are CDC’s final national counts of deaths from all causes, sorted by the month in which each death happened. Over the ten years from January 2010 to December 2019, that comes to 26,715,007 deaths. We averaged each month across those ten years.
Three choices shape the result, and each is ours, not CDC’s. First, the window. We stopped the averages at 2019 to keep the pandemic years out. CDC’s final counts for 2020 to 2024 do show January on top in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. In 2020 it was not: December led with 366,568 deaths, April came second and January ranked ninth. Second, these are counts of deaths, not death rates. The population grew over the decade, so a count is not a measure of risk. Third, we use final data only. CDC notes that provisional counts, the early figures for recent months, may differ from final counts by approximately 2%; none are used here.
The ranking by total
On the ten year average, January had 250,463 deaths. December was second with 240,029 and March third with 236,938. The quietest stretch ran from June to September, with September lowest at 207,930. That puts an average January about 20% above an average September, a gap of 42,533 deaths.
January was not first every time, though. It had the most deaths of the 12 months in 6 of the 10 years: 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2019. In the other 4 years, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016, December came first and January second. So January is the usual winner in this decade, not a fixed rule; in four years out of ten, the highest month of the year was the one that closed it.
Seen another way, January held about 9.4% of all deaths in the decade, while its 31 days are about 8.5% of the calendar.
Correcting for the length of the month
A month’s total depends partly on how many days it has, and months are not equal. January has 31 days; February has 28, or 29 in a leap year. So we also divided each month’s ten year total by the number of days it covered, leap days included.
Per day, January leads again, at about 8,079 deaths a day. The order behind it changes. February moves up to second, at 7,841 a day, ahead of December at 7,743 and March at 7,643. On totals, February ranked fifth; per day, it is the runner up. Its short length had been hiding it. August is last per day, at 6,846, with July close by at 6,876.
That puts an average January day about 17% above an average July day, about 1,203 more deaths a day on average. For a separate winter risk counted on this site, see the deadly odds of slipping on ice.
How much January varies, and what we cannot say
January itself is not a fixed size. The smallest January in the window was 2010, with 222,783 deaths, and the largest was 2018, with 286,744, a gap of 63,961. The size of January varies by year, and these counts do not tell us why.
That is the honest limit of this page. We counted the months; we did not run CDC’s cause of death breakdown, and we opened no source that explains the January peak, so we do not offer a reason. Nor is the pattern unbreakable. January led in four of the five years from 2020 to 2024, and in 2020 it ranked ninth. Final counts for 2025 are not out yet, so that year stays open. The calendar can tell you that January has 31 days. It cannot tell you what fills them. For a separate holiday season count, see drunk driving deaths at New Year’s.
The short version
In CDC final counts for 2010 to 2019, January had the most deaths of any month on average: 250,463, against 240,029 in December and 213,170 in July. It led on total deaths and on deaths per day, though December beat it in 4 of the 10 years. We count the months; we do not claim to know why January is first.
Last checked: 2026-10-19. This article was machine-checked against the sources below and has not been expert-reviewed. Spotted an error or a newer public figure? Please tell us on our contact page.
Sources
- CDC WONDER, Underlying Cause of Death, 1999 to 2020 (database D76, final data), https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html; national, all causes, grouped by year and month of death; query run Oct 18, 2026 through the WONDER API. Rerun Oct 19, 2026; all 2010 to 2019 rows matched the saved query.
- CDC WONDER, Underlying Cause of Death, 2018 to 2024, Single Race (database D158, final data), https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html; national, all causes, grouped by year and month of death; queried Oct 19, 2026. Used only for the 2020 to 2024 month ranks.
- CDC NCHS, “VSRR, State and National Provisional Counts for Live Births, Deaths, and Infant Deaths” (dataset hmz2-vwda), https://data.cdc.gov/d/hmz2-vwda (accessed Oct 18, 2026; metadata reread Oct 19, 2026). Used only for the provisional versus final note.