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What you should know about this indicator

The International Classification of Diseases (Version 10) codes that define maternal conditions are O00-O99.

How is this data described by its producer - WHO?

Maternal deaths comprise deaths of women who are pregnant or within 42 days of the termination of the pregnancy, from any cause related to or aggravated by the pregnancy or its management (other than unintentional injuries or incidental causes). Thus, under ICD rules, a death caused by an existing cardiac disease that was aggravated by a pregnancy is be included here. In practice, maternal deaths are often undercounted in death certificate data. Late maternal deaths, which occur between 42 days and 1 year after the termination of the pregnancy, are included here as well.

Reported maternal mortality rate
WHO
Reported deaths from maternal conditions per 100,000 people, based on the listed on death certificates. To allow for comparisons between countries and over time, this metric is .
Source
WHO Mortality Database (2026) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
October 13, 2026
Next expected update
March 2027
Date range
1950–2024
Unit
deaths per 100,000 people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

WHO Mortality Database

The WHO mortality database is a collection death registration data including cause-of-death information from member states.

Where they are collected, death registration data are the best source of information on key health indicators, such as life expectancy, and death registration data with cause-of-death information are the best source of information on mortality by cause, such as maternal mortality and suicide mortality.

WHO requests from all countries annual data by age, sex, and complete ICD code (e.g., 4-digit code if the 10th revision of ICD was used). Countries have reported deaths by cause of death, year, sex, and age for inclusion in the WHO Mortality Database since 1950.

The WHO only includes data, which are properly coded according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Today the database is maintained by the WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI) and contains data from over 120 countries and areas. Data reported by member states and selected areas are displayed in this portal’s interactive visualizations if the data are reported to the WHO mortality database in the requested format and at least 65% of deaths were recorded in each country and year.

Retrieved on
October 14, 2026
Retrieved from
https://platform.who.int/mortality
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI), World Health Organization (2026)

The WHO mortality database is a collection death registration data including cause-of-death information from member states.

Where they are collected, death registration data are the best source of information on key health indicators, such as life expectancy, and death registration data with cause-of-death information are the best source of information on mortality by cause, such as maternal mortality and suicide mortality.

WHO requests from all countries annual data by age, sex, and complete ICD code (e.g., 4-digit code if the 10th revision of ICD was used). Countries have reported deaths by cause of death, year, sex, and age for inclusion in the WHO Mortality Database since 1950.

The WHO only includes data, which are properly coded according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Today the database is maintained by the WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI) and contains data from over 120 countries and areas. Data reported by member states and selected areas are displayed in this portal’s interactive visualizations if the data are reported to the WHO mortality database in the requested format and at least 65% of deaths were recorded in each country and year.

Retrieved on
October 14, 2026
Retrieved from
https://platform.who.int/mortality
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
WHO Division of Data, Analytics and Delivery for Impact (DDI), World Health Organization (2026)

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

WHO's population figures for Malta count far too few people aged 85 and older in 1973–1981: between 500 and 800, compared with 1,500 in 1972 and 2,900 in 1982. Age-standardized death rates depend on that number, so we removed Malta's age-standardized rates for those years.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Reported maternal mortality rate”, part of the following publication: Saloni Dattani, Fiona Spooner, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser (2023) - “Causes of Death”. Data adapted from WHO Mortality Database. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261022-000107/grapher/maternal-mortality-rate-who-mdb.html [online resource] (archived on October 22, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

WHO Mortality Database (2026) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

WHO Mortality Database (2026) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Reported maternal mortality rate – WHO” [dataset]. WHO Mortality Database, “WHO Mortality Database” [original data]. Retrieved October 22, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261022-000107/grapher/maternal-mortality-rate-who-mdb.html (archived on October 22, 2026).

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