Healthy life expectancy is an estimate of how many years a person will still spend in good health at a certain age. The concept of healthy life expectancy thus expands on that of life expectancy by simultaneously assessing the development of mortality, morbidity and impairment. It thus estimates the probability that the gain in life years will be accompanied by a longer life in good or poor health.
Information on life expectancy comes from the life tables that are calculated annually; information on the health status of the population is obtained through surveys (Austrian Health Interview Survey and SILC). Three concepts are used: subjective health status, prevalence of chronic diseases and functional impairments. For subjective health status, a time series is available from 1978 onwards; for the other two concepts, annual values have been available since 2003.