Multistate Life Table

The multistate life table, also called the increment-decrement life table, generalizes the ordinary life table to populations that move among several living states — such as healthy and disabled, married and unmarried, or employed and unemployed — as well as the absorbing state of death. Using age-specific transition rates organized in matrices, it tracks the flows of a synthetic cohort among states and yields state-specific expectancies, such as the years a person can expect to spend healthy versus disabled.