A concept used to measure how much people are willing to spend to prevent the loss of an unidentified life. It does not purport to say how much a life is worth, but rather how much people will pay to avert a small probability of death. If 100,000 people are each willing to spend $100 to avoid a one-in-100,000 chance of death, $10m has been spent to prevent one expected death—the VSL is therefore $10m.
The concept was developed by Thomas Schelling, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2005. It replaced the "human-capital method", which valued a life by its lost earnings and therefore assigned a price of zero to those without a market wage—the old, the sick and unpaid carers.
America's Environmental Protection Agency has historically used a VSL of $7.4m in 2006 dollars ($12m in 2026 prices), mostly calculated from studies of the higher wages demanded by workers to perform jobs that raise their risk of death. One paper looked at how the signing bonuses paid by America's army varied with mortality rates during wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. America's federal government has required regulators to perform cost-benefit analyses since an executive order made by Ronald Reagan in 1981. In early 2026 the EPA announced it would no longer put a price on the health benefits of clean air when carrying out such analyses, arguing that there was too much uncertainty over how much such benefits were worth.
Britain's National Health Service rations care using quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), a related approach which takes each year of life expectancy and weights it for some measure of utility.
Living your life is a task so difficult, it has never been attempted before.