Jeanne Calment died in France in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days. Her record still stands. The next-longest verified life, Kane Tanaka's, ended at 119 years and 107 days.
At 90, Calment sold her apartment under an agreement that let her stay for life. The buyer paid her each month and would get possession when she died. He died first, at 77. His family kept paying until her death.
Is 122 the limit?
Researchers haven't established a biological cutoff at 122. A 2016 Nature paper argued for a natural lifespan limit. A reanalysis found that its apparent decline in maximum ages depended heavily on Calment's exceptional result.
One model fitted to validated records puts the chance of surviving another year after 110 at roughly one half. Whether that risk really stays flat is still disputed. But even a flat risk makes another decade very unlikely. Pearce and Raftery, 2021
| Reach age | Chance from 110 |
|---|---|
| 115 | 1 in 32 |
| 120 | 1 in 1,024 |
| 122 | 1 in 4,096 |
| 130 | 1 in 1,048,576 |
That model has no fixed upper age, yet almost everyone dies long before 130. A constant death rate wouldn't mean the surviving bodies had stopped aging.
The calorie-restriction experiment
The CALERIE trial assigned healthy adults without obesity to cut calories or keep eating normally for two years. The target cut was 25%; the restriction group achieved about 12%. They lost weight and improved several measures of heart and metabolic health. Ravussin and colleagues, 2015
A later analysis found a 2 to 3% slowdown on DunedinPACE, a blood test that estimates the pace of aging from chemical marks on DNA. Two other aging measures, PhenoAge and GrimAge, showed no significant change. The study didn't establish that participants lived longer. Waziry and colleagues, 2023
Smoking costs a decade
In a large US study, current smokers lost more than a decade of life expectancy compared with people who'd never smoked. Those who quit between 45 and 54 gained about six years compared with those who continued. These are group averages, not a promise to an individual. Jha and colleagues, 2013
How high the record might go remains a separate question. Pearce and Raftery's model gave a 13% chance that someone reaches 130 this century. That forecast depends on its survival and population assumptions. We still don't know whether a human body can last that long. The forecast
Sources and evidence
- Verified ages: Guinness World Records and LongeviQuest's validated list. Calment's apartment agreement: Guinness, 2025.
- Contested limit: Dong, Milholland and Vijg, 2016; Brown, Albers and Ritchie, 2017.
- Survival model and forecast: Pearce and Raftery, 2021. Evidence against a flat late-life death rate: Dang and colleagues, 2023. The table uses a rounded assumption, not observed counts.
- Randomized calorie-restriction trial: Ravussin and colleagues, 2015; subsequent blood-test analysis: Waziry and colleagues, 2023. Neither result establishes a gain in human lifespan.
- Smoking: Jha and colleagues, 2013. A national observational cohort, with comparisons adjusted for age, education, alcohol use and body fat.