The National Death Index is a free, public reference for cross-national mortality. It's part of Clay Indices, a small network of raw-data sites built on one idea: take public figures, organize them honestly, rank them, cite them, and let the reader conclude.
Good mortality data already exists — at the World Bank, at the WHO, in the academic literature. What's missing is a place that puts it in front of an ordinary reader without an agenda wrapped around it. Most coverage of these numbers arrives pre-digested, with the conclusion already drawn for you. We'd rather hand you the table and the definition and trust you with the rest.
Present raw facts; never tell the reader what to conclude. The data and the ranking are the article. A clean "countries ranked by X" is inherently shareable and argument-provoking, and that's by design — the rankings are how the site spreads. But "raw" means raw correct: the right denominator, the measure labeled for what it counts, the confounds flagged rather than buried. That discipline is the whole brand. See the methodology for how we hold it.
Everything here is free to read and free to reuse with attribution. Every ranking and comparison can be downloaded as a CSV. If you cite a figure, cite the source we cite — the World Bank or the WHO — and you're on solid ground.
The data pipeline and much of the writing are built with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing. The figures in the Notes are computed from the same data that feeds the tables, so the prose can't drift from the numbers. Where we're unsure, we say so.