New ONS figures show the number of people aged 90 and over in England and Wales reached 581,400 in mid-2025, a 3.0 per cent rise on the previous year and 16.3 per cent higher than a decade ago.
581,400 people aged 90 or over were living in England and Wales at mid-2025, according to new estimates published by the Office for National Statistics. That’s a 3.0 per cent increase compared with mid-2024, and the figures show the 90-plus population is now 16.3 per cent larger than it was in mid-2015. For context, the wider UK figure stood at an estimated 625,000 people aged 90 and over in 2024 — and just 33.7 per cent of them were men.
The ONS posted the data as part of its long-running series “Estimates of the very old, including centenarians, England and Wales: 2002 to 2025”, which tracks single years of age from 90 through to 104, plus a 105-and-over group. The estimates are built using survivor-ratio methods — including the Kannisto–Thatcher approach — which piece together the very old population from deaths data, earlier population counts, and migration adjustments. All figures are rounded to the nearest 10 and are provisional, meaning they can be revised when more complete deaths registrations become available.
The trend has been consistent. In 2023 the ONS put the England and Wales 90-plus population at 551,758. By mid-2025 that figure has climbed to 581,400 — an increase of nearly 30,000 in roughly two years. The UK also had an estimated 16,600 centenarians aged 100 and over in 2024.
For Kent, the direction of travel matters even without a county-specific 2025 figure — the ONS release covers England and Wales as a whole, and any Kent-level number from this dataset alone would be unverified. But Kent is among the English counties with a major older population, and NHS Kent and Medway Integrated Care Board, Kent County Council, and Medway Council all draw on ONS age-specific estimates to plan adult social care, geriatric medicine, hospital capacity, and housing. A growing 90-plus cohort points toward rising demand for domiciliary care, dementia support, falls prevention, and end-of-life services across the county.
Some researchers have questioned whether official methods fully capture the true number of very old people, pointing to possible underestimation at extreme ages where population counts are small. The ONS itself classifies the estimates as provisional. But the broad upward direction — 16.3 per cent over ten years — is consistent across successive releases, and government departments including the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health and Social Care treat the series as the authoritative baseline for pension and social care planning.
Source: @ONS