France Counted 52 Heatwave Days This Summer and Roughly 7,000 Extra Deaths. Three-Quarters Were Over 75.

French Health Minister Stephanie Rist said on Friday that France recorded around 7,000 excess deaths during this summer's heatwaves, a figure covering the period through late July. Final data will come in the autumn. It is the deadliest heat event the country has recorded since 2003, the summer that forced France to build a national heat-alert system in the first place.

The arithmetic behind the number is grim in its detail. Sante publique France, the national public health agency, counted 5,764 excess deaths between June 17 and 30 alone — more than 36% above the level expected for that stretch of the calendar. Another 1,243 followed between July 2 and 22, and about 300 came during an initial hot spell in late May. Nearly three-quarters of the extra deaths were people aged 75 and over, though the agency found elevated mortality in every age band from 45 upward.

What made 2026 different was not a single spike but the accumulation. France logged 52 heatwave days from mid-June onward. The previous benchmark years look mild beside it: 33 days in 2022, and 22 days in 2003. Three separate heatwaves did the work — 14 days in June, 16 in July, and a 22-day stretch starting in late July that became the second-longest ever recorded in France, just short of the 23-day heatwave of July 1983.

June 24 and 25 were the hottest days ever measured across mainland France. The national thermal indicator, an average of readings from 30 weather stations used to compare heat events across decades, hit 30C on those days, passing the mark set in August 2003. France went on to record its hottest summer since measurements began.

Health authorities are careful about the phrase "heat deaths." Excess mortality is a statistical comparison against expected deaths for a given period, not a cause-of-death tally, and people die of multiple causes at once. Heat kills mostly by aggravating cardiovascular and respiratory disease and by pushing frail, dehydrated and medicated patients over an edge they were already near.

France was not alone. Belgium's public health institute estimated roughly 2,570 excess deaths between June 18 and July 17, with the total expected to rise once later periods including the wildfires are counted; the Belgian government has cited a figure near 3,000 for the summer. Provisional counts across eight European countries — Austria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain — put summer excess deaths in the region of 33,000. For comparison, the 2022 European heat summer was later assessed at roughly 61,000 deaths across the continent, a reminder that the final 2026 number will likely be larger than the one announced Friday.