Potential years of life lost is a summary measure of premature mortality, providing an explicit way of weighting deaths occurring at younger ages, which may be preventable.

The calculation involves totalling deaths occurring at each age and multiplying this with the number of remaining years to live up to a selected age limit (75 years old is used in OECD Health Statistics). In order to assure cross-country and trend comparison, the potential years of life lost are standardised, for each country and each year. The total OECD population in 2015 is taken as the reference population for age standardisation.

This indicator is measured as a total number of years lost per 100 000 inhabitants aged 0-74 years old, by gender.