Mechanisms underlying racial and rural-urban differences in life expectancy in the U.S. vary over time, across populations, and across regions. Descriptive analyses that identify the contributions of cause of death to life expectancy by rurality and race are essential for understanding these mechanisms. However, integrated decompositions of the age-at-death and incidence contributions to race-specific rural-urban mortality disparities are needed. We decompose the rural-urban gap in life expectancy from 1974 to 2016, addressing four questions: 1) How have the differences in the age-at-death and risk of dying from a particular cause contributed to the rural-urban life expectancy gap over time? 2) To what extent are contemporary rural-urban differences in life expectancy driven by age versus incidence effects? 3) And how do these patterns vary by race, and what does this reveal about racialized patterns in rural-urban life expectancy disparities? We find evidence of a growing age effect across all groups, but the specific contribution of the cause-of-death component to this age-at-death effect varies widely by group. This result has implications for future research on the drivers of spatial and structural disparities in health and mortality outcomes.