Published September 10, 2026. Last updated September 10, 2026.
How common is fear of death? In the newest nationally representative U.S. survey, 28.6 percent of adults said they were afraid or very afraid of dying. In a separate UK survey, the number was 41 percent, against 43 percent who said they were not afraid. The two figures come from different countries, different survey firms, and different years, which is part of the answer: “how common” depends on which sample answered and how the question was worded, and this page carries both.
Fear of a loved one’s death, fear of the act of dying, and the psychological construct researchers call death anxiety are three different things measured in three different ways. This page keeps them separate, names the document behind every figure, and states plainly where no representative number exists at all.
Key takeaways
- 28.6 percent of a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults said they were afraid or very afraid of dying, in survey fieldwork conducted in 2025 (Chapman University Survey of American Fears, Wave 11, 2025).
- In the same 2025 U.S. sample, far more people feared a loved one dying than feared their own death: 55.3 percent afraid or very afraid of people they love dying, against 28.6 percent for their own dying (Chapman University Survey of American Fears, Wave 11, 2025).
- A year earlier, in 2024 fieldwork, 31.6 percent of U.S. adults reported being afraid or very afraid of dying, three points higher than the 2025 figure from the same annual survey (Chapman University Survey of American Fears, Wave 10, 2024).
- Among 2,164 UK adults aged 16 and older surveyed March 19 to 23, 2021, 41 percent said their own death frightens them and 43 percent said it does not, with the remainder undecided (YouGov Death Study, 2021).
- In the same 2021 UK sample, women were more likely than men to say their own death frightens them, 47 percent against 35 percent (YouGov Death Study, 2021).
- Across 164 journal articles and 277 experiments testing whether reminders of death change behavior, the pooled effect was moderate, r equals .35, strongest among American participants and college students (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010).
- Pooling 15 randomized controlled trials of talk-based and exposure-based treatments for death anxiety produced a small to medium reduction in symptoms, g equals .45, published in 2018 (Menzies, Zuccala, Sharpe, & Dar-Nimrod, 2018).
Cite this page
APA: Eduard, S. (2026, September 10). How common is fear of death? What the surveys actually measure. StumbleTowardTheLight. https://stumbletowardthelight.com/how-common-is-fear-of-death/
MLA: Eduard, Sebastian. “How Common Is Fear of Death? What the Surveys Actually Measure.” StumbleTowardTheLight, 10 Sept. 2026, stumbletowardthelight.com/how-common-is-fear-of-death/.
The source table
| # | Statistic | Data collected | Source type | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 28.6% of U.S. adults afraid or very afraid of dying; nationally representative probability sample, 1,015 respondents, +/- 3.6% margin of error | 2025 | primary study | Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 11 (2025) |
| 2 | 55.3% of the same sample afraid or very afraid of a loved one dying, against 28.6% for their own dying | 2025 | primary study | Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 11 (2025) |
| 3 | 31.6% of U.S. adults afraid or very afraid of dying; 1,008 respondents, +/- 4% margin of error, fielded spring 2024 | 2024 | primary study | Chapman Survey of American Fears, Wave 10 (2024) |
| 4 | 41% of UK adults afraid of their own death, 43% not afraid; 2,164 respondents aged 16+ | Mar 19-23, 2021 | vendor survey | YouGov Death Study (2021) |
| 5 | Women 47% afraid of their own death against men 35%, same UK sample | Mar 19-23, 2021 | vendor survey | YouGov Death Study (2021) |
| 6 | Original 15-item Death Anxiety Scale, developed and validated on psychiatric and non-psychiatric samples | data collected 1967-1969 (published 1970) | primary study | Templer, 1970 |
| 7 | Systematic review of 19 studies using the Death Anxiety Scale, covering students, nurses, patients, and veterans across multiple countries; no pooled general-population prevalence rate reported | studies 1980s-2018 (published 2025) | derived (systematic review, no pooled rate calculated) | Srivastava & Ghosh, 2025 |
| 8 | Meta-analysis of 164 articles, 277 experiments testing mortality salience effects; pooled r = .35 | studies through 2010 (published 2010) | primary study | Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010 |
| 9 | Quantitative review of 49 studies on death anxiety and age in older adults | studies through 1999 (published 1999) | primary study | Fortner & Neimeyer, 1999 |
| 10 | 304 adults 18-87 and 113 women 18-85; death anxiety peaked in the 20s for both sexes and declined after, with a second peak for women in their 50s | published 2007 | primary study | Russac, Gatliff, Reece, & Spottswood, 2007 |
| 11 | Meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials of psychosocial interventions for death anxiety; g = .45 | published 2018 | primary study | Menzies, Zuccala, Sharpe, & Dar-Nimrod, 2018 |
How common is fear of death?
Between roughly three in ten and four in ten adults, depending on the country and the year. The newest U.S. figure is 28.6 percent afraid or very afraid of dying, from a nationally representative sample surveyed in 2025 (Chapman, Wave 11). The UK figure sits higher: 41 percent afraid, against 43 percent who say they are not, from a 2021 sample of 2,164 adults (YouGov, 2021). Neither figure is “the” answer. They are two nationally sampled snapshots, worded differently, taken four years apart, in two different countries, and both are carried here as two separate figures, each with its own year attached.
What the two surveys agree on is that fear of one’s own dying sits well below fear of losing someone else. In the same 2025 U.S. sample, 55.3 percent feared a loved one dying, nearly double the 28.6 percent who feared their own (Chapman, Wave 11). Both fears sit inside the same annual survey of 65 separate items, alongside questions about corrupt officials, cyberterrorism, and nuclear war, so “fear of dying” is being measured against a wide field of competing dread. What that psychological unease around one’s own mortality actually consists of, and the theory built to explain it, is covered in fear of death anxiety.
Fear of death statistics: what percentage of people fear death?
The clearest year-over-year U.S. figure comes from the same annual survey run twice. In 2024, 31.6 percent of adults reported being afraid or very afraid of dying; in 2025, that fell to 28.6 percent, a three-point drop across the same instrument fielded a year apart (Chapman, Wave 10 and Wave 11). Whether that reflects a real shift in how Americans feel about dying, or ordinary year-to-year noise in an 85-to-65-item survey, is not something a single two-point comparison can settle.
The gender gap is the more consistent finding across both national surveys. In the UK sample, 47 percent of women said their own death frightens them, against 35 percent of men, and the gap widened further by age: 56 percent of women 25 to 39 reported fear of their own death, against 26 percent of men 60 and older (YouGov, 2021). That age pattern, fear falling among older respondents, shows up again in the dedicated research literature below.
Death anxiety statistics: how is death anxiety measured, and how common is it?
Death anxiety is the term researchers use for the broader, more clinical construct, distinct from a single survey question about whether dying is frightening. The standard instrument is the Death Anxiety Scale, a 15-item questionnaire Donald Templer built and validated on psychiatric and non-psychiatric samples between 1967 and 1969, published in 1970 (Templer, 1970). It asks about specific worries, such as thinking about death often or dreading it, and produces a numeric score built from several items.
No representative survey has applied the Death Anxiety Scale to a general population sample the way Chapman and YouGov apply their single-item question. A 2025 systematic review pooled 19 studies using the scale, spanning students, nurses, hospital patients, and war veterans across several countries, and reports no combined general-population prevalence rate; the studies are too different in sample and setting to average into one figure (Srivastava & Ghosh, 2025). So a question like “what percentage of people have clinically significant death anxiety” has no answer in the current literature. What exists instead is a validated scale, decades of studies using it on specific populations, and no population-wide norm.
Thanatophobia statistics: is there a prevalence rate for the clinical fear of death?
There is no prevalence figure, because thanatophobia is not a diagnosis with its own entry in the DSM-5’s classification of specific phobias, and no epidemiological survey has measured it as a standalone clinical category the way surveys track social anxiety disorder or panic disorder. The word gets used online as a label for severe death anxiety, but the research measuring death-related fear runs through the Death Anxiety Scale and similar instruments covered above. Anyone searching for a percentage attached to “thanatophobia” specifically will not find one traced to a primary study, because that primary study does not exist yet.
Mortality salience and terror management theory statistics
Mortality salience is the experimental technique researchers use to study how a brief reminder of death changes behavior, and it is the method behind most terror management theory research. A 2010 meta-analysis pooled 164 published articles and 277 individual experiments testing the mortality salience hypothesis, finding a moderate combined effect, r equals .35, on outcomes like defending one’s own cultural worldview and favoring one’s own group (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010). The effect ran stronger in studies using American participants, college student samples, and a longer gap between the death reminder and the measured response. That volume of research, 277 separate tests of the same basic prediction, is itself one of the more citable facts in this literature: few psychological hypotheses have been run this many times by this many independent labs. The theory those experiments test is covered in more depth in fear of death anxiety.
Does fear of death get worse with age?
A common expectation is that death anxiety should climb as death gets physically closer, making the oldest adults the most afraid. Two independent bodies of research point the other way. Russac and colleagues tested people aged 18 to 87 across two separate studies, one using the Collett-Lester Fear of Death Scale and one using the Death Anxiety Scale, and found death anxiety highest in both sexes during their 20s, then declining sharply through the middle and older adult years, with a smaller second rise for women in their 50s that did not appear among men (Russac et al., 2007). An earlier review pooling 49 separate studies on death anxiety in older adults found that what predicted higher death anxiety late in life was physical illness, psychological distress, and a low sense of having lived a coherent life, factors that can affect a person at any age (Fortner & Neimeyer, 1999). Getting older, on its own, tracks with less reported fear of death in this body of research.
That finding sits alongside a broader pattern in how people relate to the brevity of life: the years that feel longest ahead, early adulthood, carry the sharpest edge of dread, and the years with fewer of them left carry less.
Can death anxiety be treated?
A 2018 meta-analysis pooled 15 randomized controlled trials testing talk-based and exposure-based treatments for death anxiety and found a small to medium reduction in symptoms overall, g equals .45, with cognitive behavioral approaches that included direct exposure to death-related material showing the largest effects (Menzies et al., 2018). The different therapeutic approaches behind those trials, and what each one actually does in a session, are laid out in therapy for existential dread.
If thoughts about dying have moved past occasional and started crowding out sleep, appetite, or the ability to get through an ordinary day, that pattern has crossed past what a stats page can address, and a mental health professional trained in this area is the appropriate next step.
Most people living with ordinary death anxiety sit closer to what shows up in the existential dread versus existential crisis distinction: a recurring discomfort that surfaces, gets noticed, and passes on its own. That underlying reality, explored at the site’s purpose and meaning statistics hub, is real and ordinary, a fact of being a creature that knows its own ending, and living with it well does not require clinical intervention for most people who feel it.
Methodology
Every figure above was traced to the document reporting it and read there directly: the two Chapman University Survey of American Fears data files, the YouGov death study article, Templer’s original 1970 paper, the 2025 systematic review of the Death Anxiety Scale, and the meta-analyses by Burke, Martens, and Faucher; Fortner and Neimeyer; Russac and colleagues; and Menzies and colleagues. Selection favored the newest available national survey figures for the headline questions and the most recent meta-analysis available for each research question behind them, with every figure’s collection year stated separately from its publication year where the two differ. Sources last verified September 10, 2026.
Cite this page
APA: Eduard, S. (2026, September 10). How common is fear of death? What the surveys actually measure. StumbleTowardTheLight. https://stumbletowardthelight.com/how-common-is-fear-of-death/
MLA: Eduard, Sebastian. “How Common Is Fear of Death? What the Surveys Actually Measure.” StumbleTowardTheLight, 10 Sept. 2026, stumbletowardthelight.com/how-common-is-fear-of-death/.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of people are afraid of dying?
28.6 percent of U.S. adults in 2025 survey fieldwork, and 41 percent of UK adults in 2021 survey fieldwork, each from a nationally sampled survey asking about fear of their own death directly (Chapman, 2025; YouGov, 2021).
Is thanatophobia a real diagnosis?
No. It has no entry of its own in the DSM-5’s specific phobia category, and no epidemiological survey has measured it as a standalone diagnosis. Research on death-related fear uses the Death Anxiety Scale and similar instruments instead (Templer, 1970).
Does fear of death increase with age?
The research finds the opposite pattern. Death anxiety peaked in the 20s for both men and women across two studies covering ages 18 to 87, then declined, with a smaller secondary rise for women in their 50s (Russac et al., 2007).
How much research exists on terror management theory?
A 2010 meta-analysis pooled 164 articles and 277 experiments testing the mortality salience hypothesis, finding a moderate pooled effect of r = .35 (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010).
Can death anxiety be treated?
A meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials found psychosocial treatments produced a small to medium reduction in death anxiety symptoms, with exposure-based cognitive behavioral therapy showing the strongest results (Menzies et al., 2018).
References
Burke, B. L., Martens, A., & Faucher, E. H. (2010). Two decades of terror management theory: A meta-analysis of mortality salience research. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 155-195.
Chapman University, Earl Babbie Research Center. (2024). The Chapman survey of American fears, Wave 10 (2024): The complete list of fears.
Chapman University, Earl Babbie Research Center. (2025). The Chapman survey of American fears, Wave 11 (2025): The complete list of fears.
Fortner, B. V., & Neimeyer, R. A. (1999). Death anxiety in older adults: A quantitative review. Death Studies, 23(5), 387-411.
Menzies, R. E., Zuccala, M., Sharpe, L., & Dar-Nimrod, I. (2018). The effects of psychosocial interventions on death anxiety: A meta-analysis and systematic review of randomised controlled trials. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 59, 64-73.
Russac, R. J., Gatliff, C., Reece, M., & Spottswood, D. (2007). Death anxiety across the adult years: An examination of age and gender effects. Death Studies, 31(6), 549-561.
Srivastava, M., & Ghosh, A. (2025). Death anxiety measurement using Templer Death Anxiety Scale: A systematic review and validation study. BMC Nursing, 24, Article 1431.
Templer, D. I. (1970). The construction and validation of a death anxiety scale. The Journal of General Psychology, 82(2), 165-177.
YouGov. (2021). The YouGov death study: The fear of dying.