he HMD provides detailed high-quality harmonized mortality and population estimates to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in human longevity. The HMD follows open data principles.

The Human Mortality Database (HMD) contains original calculations of all-cause death rates and life tables for national populations (countries or areas), as well as the input data used in constructing those tables. The input data consist of death counts from vital statistics, plus census counts, birth counts, and population estimates from various sources.

The HMD now also contains cause-specific mortality indicators for many of the database countries. The Human Cause-of-Death Data (HCD@HMD) series is further described below. In addition, the HMD provides weekly death counts and death rates for most of the countries as part of the Short-Term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF@HMD) data series.