Weekly Fiscal Facts are provided to Wisconsin Newspaper Association members by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. The Wisconsin Policy Forum logo can be downloaded here.
After spiking during the pandemic, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths has declined in Wisconsin and nationally. Still, rates of such deaths remain significantly elevated from pre-pandemic years, particularly in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin’s rate of alcohol-induced deaths has seen major shifts in recent years, mirroring a national trend in which these deaths sharply increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and then gradually declined. The recent drop is welcome news. Yet it should not obscure other, longer-running trends that continue to warrant concern – and may merit a response by state and local policymakers.
In 2024, Wisconsin recorded 1,076 deaths due to alcohol-induced causes, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) WONDER database. Its alcohol-induced mortality rate was 18.2 per 100,000 residents.
This rate has declined since the pandemic. Yet it remains well above 2019 levels, when it was 14.9 per 100,000, which resulted in 865 such deaths that year. Far from being a low point, the 2019 rate was, at that time, our state’s highest in more than two decades. In 1999, the first year for which we have data, 356 Wisconsinites died of alcohol-induced causes.
In another alarming trend, Wisconsin’s rate of alcohol-induced deaths has risen well above the national average. Some may find this unsurprising, since our state’s identity has long been linked to the alcohol industry, and rates of binge drinking here are higher than in most states.
Yet as recently as the early 2010s, Wisconsin closely tracked the nation in its rate of alcohol-induced deaths. That is no longer the case: In 2024, the national rate of alcohol-induced deaths was 13.9 per 100,000.
Most alcohol-induced deaths occur among middle-aged and older adults. Wisconsin’s population is older than the nation on average, but when we adjust these rates for age, a similar dynamic remains. In 2024, the national rate of alcohol-induced deaths was 12.2 on an age-adjusted basis, or nearly 21% lower than Wisconsin’s age-adjusted rate of 15.0 per 100,000
When we break down these mortality rates by race and Hispanic origin of the deceased person, we find a broad increase across these groups from 2018 to 2024. Our analysis also looked at the difference between age-adjusted, alcohol-induced mortality rates for these groups in Wisconsin, compared to rates for those same racial or ethnic groups nationally.
In this comparison, our state’s largest outlier is its Black residents. At a national level, all Black Americans have an age-adjusted alcohol-induced mortality rate, at 8.5 per 100,000 residents in 2024, that was well below the rate for the population overall, which was 12.2. But in Wisconsin, the age-adjusted 2024 rate for Black residents was 19.9, more than double the rate for all Black Americans.
In Wisconsin and nationally, men have long been much more likely to die of alcohol-induced causes than women. While that remains the case today – and while both genders are seeing large increases in alcohol-induced mortality — women have seen greater recent increases.
This information is provided to Wisconsin Newspaper Association members as a service of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. Learn more at wispolicyforum.org.
