The COVID-19 pandemic led to substantial life expectancy losses globally. Typically, life expectancy returns to its previous trajectory after reversals, but whether this is true for the COVID-19 pandemic is unknown. We update life expectancy estimates through 2024 for 33 high-income countries with available age-sex disaggregated mortality data from the Short Term Mortality Fluctuations (STMF) database. We calculate observed life expectancy for individual and combined years 2020-2024 and life expectancy “deficits” compared to pre-pandemic forecasts for each individual year and the overall period. Across the five-year period from 2020-24, we find that the pandemic generated a multi-year period shock in most countries, with substantial variation in recovery. In 2024, 30 out of 33 countries still had lower life expectancy than their Lee-Carter forecasts based on pre-pandemic data. Overall, countries with sharper mortality shocks such as the USA and Bulgaria saw quicker recoveries to pre-pandemic trajectories, but higher cumulative mortality. Some countries that delayed mass infection such as Norway and Finland are seeing persistent life expectancy deficits through 2024, but with lower overall cumulative pandemic mortality. Our findings highlight the variation in the mortality impact of COVID-19 across high-income countries through 2024. Five years later, the COVID-19 period shock has not stopped reverberating.