Turkey recorded 491,684 deaths in 2025, with circulatory system diseases remaining the leading cause of death as the country’s population continues to age, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) announced on Thursday.
The number of deaths rose from 489,734 in 2024, with men accounting for 55.1 percent of those who died and women 44.9 percent.
The crude death rate, which shows the number of deaths per 1,000 people, remained unchanged at 5.7 per 1,000 in 2025.
Diseases of the circulatory system accounted for 34.7 percent of all deaths, followed by benign and malignant tumors at 16.1 percent and respiratory system diseases at 15.1 percent.
Among deaths linked to circulatory system diseases, 42.3 percent were caused by ischemic heart diseases, 24.6 percent by other heart diseases and 18.2 percent by cerebrovascular diseases, a category that includes strokes, TurkStat said.
The figures were released as Turkey faces a shift in its age structure. The country’s population aged 65 and over rose to 9.58 million in 2025 from 7.95 million in 2020, increasing its share of the population to 11.1 percent from 9.5 percent, TurkStat said in a separate report in March.
Aging can increase the number of deaths linked to heart and circulatory diseases because these conditions are more common among older people, although TurkStat did not directly attribute the 2025 cause-of-death figures to demographic aging.
Sinop, a Black Sea province with an older population profile than many parts of Turkey, had the country’s highest crude death rate at 10.8 per 1,000 people in 2025, followed by Kastamonu at 10.2, Giresun at 9.6 and Balıkesir at 9.5.
Şırnak had the lowest crude death rate at 2.3 per 1,000 people, followed by Hakkari at 2.5, Van at 3.1 and Batman and Şanlıurfa at 3.2.
Çanakkale had the highest share of deaths from circulatory system disease at 47.7 percent, followed by Balıkesir at 42.8 percent, Hatay at 42.2 percent and Burdur at 42 percent.
Infant deaths fell to 6,988 in 2025 from 8,484 in 2024, while the infant mortality rate declined to 7.8 deaths per 1,000 live births from nine.
The under-five mortality rate, which shows the probability of dying before age five, fell to 9.5 per 1,000 in 2025 from 11.1 in 2024.