What effect does rising income inequality have on longevity in advanced developed economies? This paper focuses on the effect of income inequality on mortality rates for men and women in a subset of OECD countries over nearly six decades from 1950–2008.  Using adult mortality rates at aged sixty-five as the outcome measure of mortality, the latest available data on inverted Pareto-Lorenz coefficient as a measure of income inequality, the authors conduct a range of analysis to investigate the relationship. The findings show that income inequality has a negative effect on mortality rates for both men and women, that is, an increase in income inequality at the top of the distribution does not appear to have a detrimental effect on adult mortality rates in the population of advanced developed countries. For every one unit increase in income inequality, female mortality rates decreased by 0.024 percentage points (p≤0.001) and male mortality rates decreased by 0.052 percentage points (p≤0.001). Dynamic OLS results show that for every one unit increase in income inequality, female mortality rates decreased by 0.032 percentage points (p≤0.01) and male mortality rates decreased by 0.067 percentage points (p≤0.001). The findings remain robust to changes in methodology and the inclusion of control variables including GDP, population and the health capital index.