NISRA provisional death statistics are based on death registration information collected by the General Register Office.
Information on the quality of the data used to produce death statistics is available in the Northern Ireland Deaths Background Quality Report.
Excess Deaths
‘Excess’ deaths have typically been defined as the number of deaths recorded, above the number that might be expected to occur, in an ‘average’ year. A common UK-wide approach to producing national estimates of excess mortality was developed and agreed across government and the devolved administrations. A blog giving background information to this development work was published by ONS on Thursday 15 February, Following that, a methodology paper and data tables, including breakdowns for the constituent administrations in the UK, and was released by ONS on 20 February 2024.
To supplement this, NISRA published an initial short explainer paper in February 2024. It provided an overview of the changes in the methodology for calculating an estimate of expected deaths, used to determine excess deaths, and the impact that will have in Northern Ireland. Alongside this, NISRA also published an extraction from the UK dataset of the Northern Ireland specific data for the convenience of users. NISRA then followed up with a more detailed information paper in January 2025, that demonstrates, through evidence, the benefits of new approach over the previous one. Both papers are available at the link below.
- Northern Ireland information paper on excess, deaths change in methodology
- Northern Ireland back series of excess deaths
From Friday, 23 February, the new methodology was adapted to report on excess deaths in Table 1 of the weekly deaths tables. The historical final weekly deaths data was also expanded to include estimates of expected and excess deaths based on the new methodology. Since then both the quarterly and annual outputs have been expanded to include breakdowns of excess deaths.