Deaths
Uses death certificate data to provide the most recent publicly available information on deaths of Texas residents by year, demographics, and across state and geographic regions.
For questions about this data, send email to vstat@dshs.texas.gov or call (512) 776-7509
Data Source
Texas Vital Statistics (VSTAT)Data Description
These death data come from death certificates for Texas residents who died in state and out of state. Each death certificate identifies a single underlying cause of death that is defined as the disease or injury that initiated the events resulting in death. Causes of death are coded using the Tenth Revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) implemented in 1999.
Texas adopted the new U.S. Standard Certificates of Death and Fetal Death in 2006, so some data items might not be directly comparable with previous years.
Measure Information
Counts and Rates
Data suppression are indicated with "- -" for both counts and rates. Suppression occurs for counts that are 9 or less, or for rates that have fewer than 21 cases in the numerator.
When creating a custom data table, if a certain selection of row variables has no counts, that row will not show.
When a data spreadsheet is downloaded, suppressed values will appear as "-1"
Causes of Death are aggregated based on predefined lists of cause-of-death categories developed by National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) for tabulating mortality statistics. The causes of death presented in the table refer to the NCHS List of 113 Selected Causes of Death:ICD-10 Cause-of-Death Lists for Tabulating Mortality Statistics.
The top ten leading causes of death are based on NCHS' broader 52 rankable cause-of-death categories.
Race and Ethnicity For data prior to 2012, Non-Hispanic Other race/ethnicity category also includes records with Unknown race/ethnicity. For data 2012+, Non-Hispanic Other race/ethnicity category also includes records with Unknown race/ethnicity and Multiple race responses.
Zip Codes Resident zip code is presented as reported by the decedent's family and may contain invalid zip codes and/or those of Post Office boxes. Zip codes that were reported as 4 or less digits, 6 or more digits, not valid to Texas, 0, blank, or other invalid characters were recoded into 99999.
COVID-19 Related Deaths are determined by visual inspection of Texas Death Certificates conducted by the Department of State Health Services Laboratory and Infectious Disease Services Division. All other causes of death are tabulated using ICD-10.
Population Estimates for total population used to calculate rates by year, geographical area, and by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, are sourced from the Texas Demographer: https://demographics.texas.gov/Data/TPEPP/Estimates/
Additional Information
Texas DSHS Vital Statistics https://www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/vstat/Default.shtm