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It is uncertain whether or how rapidly elderly women continue to lose bone with advancing age. To determine rates of change in bone mass at the hip and at the calcaneus in elderly women and to compare these rates of change among estrogen users and nonusers, we prospectively measured rates of change in bone mineral density (BMD) at the total hip and its four subregions (mean ± SD, 3.55 ± 0.29 years between examinations) and at the calcaneus (mean ± SD, 5.69 ± 0.33 years between examinations) in 5698 community‐dwelling white women aged 65 years or older at the baseline examination. The rate of decline in total hip BMD steadily increased from 2.5 mg/cm²/year (95% confidence interval 2.0 to 2.9) in women 67–69 years old to 10.4 mg/cm²/year in those aged 85 or older (95% confidence interval 8.4 to 12.4). The rate of bone loss also increased with aging at all subregions of the hip and at the …