Why do close to half a million men die by suicide every year?
DATA Report No.1 series, Part 1 of 12
In 2021, an estimated 486,528 men died by suicide worldwide. And it is a floor, not a ceiling.
By Charley Bickers, Founder of UN For Men - The United Global Alliance For Men & Boys
In 2021, an estimated 486,528 men died by suicide around the world [S1]. That is about 1,333 men every day (our calculation: 486,528 ÷ 365).
Men accounted for 68% of all suicide deaths that year (our calculation: 486,528 of 718,033) [S1]. Two of every three people lost to suicide were men.
These figures are not distant. In England and Wales, 4,620 of the 6,162 suicides registered in 2025 were men: 75%, or 12.7 men every day (our calculation on ONS figures) [S9]. Across the United Kingdom, the latest registrations come to 5,368 male suicides, 14.7 every day (our calculation) [S9, S14].
Each of those numbers is a person: a dad, a son, a brother, an uncle, a friend. WHO reports that 56% of all suicides occur before the age of 50 [S7]. That figure covers women and men together, not men alone, but it tells us suicide is mostly a death of the working and parenting years, the years in which families, workplaces and communities depend on people most.
What the count leaves out
The global figures above describe 2021. They are the latest that exist [S1]. They are also minimum figures.
Most countries cannot count suicide directly from their death records, so WHO has to model their rates [S29]. Where researchers have gone back and rechecked death records, the number of suicides has gone up [S32, S33]. No peer-reviewed study yet gives a single global estimate of how many deaths are missed. That is why DATA Report No.1 says that every global total, including its own, "should be read as a floor".
There is a smaller point of honesty too. The dataset we use gives a world total of 718,033 suicides in 2021. WHO's own published total is 727,000 [S7]. The figures differ slightly because of how they are compiled. Neither can fully capture deaths that were never recorded as suicide.
Why this report, and why now
In 2010 the United Nations created UN Women. Sixteen years later, there is still no United Nations body for men.
The United Global Alliance For Men & Boys was founded to bring together organisations working for the health, rights and wellbeing of men and boys, and to put the evidence in one place. DATA Report No.1 is the Alliance's first report. It gathers the latest global estimates, national statistics and peer-reviewed research on male suicide, and it sets out plainly what is known and what is not.
Over the coming weeks, this series will take one finding at a time, in twelve short parts. Each part will give the figures, the sources and the gaps.
The question
Close to half a million men a year is what the world has managed to count. It is the floor.
So the question for every government, and for the international system, is a simple one. If this is the minimum, how many men are we really losing, and who is responsible for finding out?
The Alliance believes that question deserves an answer. The first step is to look at the evidence in full.
Sources
Source numbers refer to the full report's source list.
[S1] WHO, Global Health Estimates 2021 (2024 release): deaths and age-standardised death rates from self-harm by sex, via Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates-by-sex-who ; catalogue: https://catalog.ourworldindata.org/grapher/who/2024-07-30/ghe/ghe.feather
Adapted from WHO Global Health Estimates 2021, 2024. WHO is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this adaptation. https://www.who.int/data/global-health-estimates · Accessed 3 November 2026.
[S7] WHO, Suicide worldwide in 2021: global health estimates (23 May 2025), publication overview. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240110069
[S9] Office for National Statistics, Suicides in England and Wales: 1981 to 2025, Table 1. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/1981to2025
[S14] National Records of Scotland, Probable suicides 2024; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, Suicide statistics 2024. https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/publications/probable-suicides-2024/ ; https://www.nisra.gov.uk/publications/suicide-statistics-2024
[S29] WHO, Mental Health, Brain Health and Substance Use: suicide data page, "Data quality" (estimates for 2021). https://www.who.int/teams/mental-health-and-substance-use/data-research/suicide-data
[S32] Bakst SS, Braun T, Zucker I, Amitai Z et al., "The accuracy of suicide statistics: are true suicide deaths misclassified?", Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 2016; 51(1): 115–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-015-1119-x
[S33] Li F, Lu X, Ou Y, Yip PSF et al., "The influence of undetermined deaths on suicides in Shanghai, China", Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 2019; 54(1): 111–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00127-018-1596-9
Download the full DATA Report No.1: https://www.unformen.com/report-no-1
Organisations are invited to join the Alliance; anyone may get in touch: https://www.unformen.com/alliance
DATA Report No.1, published by The United Global Alliance For Men & Boys.
The United Global Alliance For Men & Boys is not part of, affiliated with, or endorsed by the United Nations. UN for Men is our campaign for a dedicated UN body for men and boys.
Comments