THE ARISING · Markets & Strategy
Insurers Split on How the Pandemic Should Shape Future Mortality Assumptions
Insurers that price life policies and annuities still do not agree on what the pandemic means for how long people will live. That is the central finding of a new industry survey, and it matters because those assumptions sit underneath the price of every long-dated promise.
The Society of Actuaries Research Institute published its 2025 Mortality Improvement Survey Report on October 15, 2026. Kara Clark, FSA, wrote the report. It draws on responses from 47 company-country respondents.
According to the report, there is no clear industry consensus on how post-pandemic mortality experience should affect future mortality improvement assumptions. Assumptions vary by company, product, business function, attained age and projection horizon. Mortality improvement means the expected rate at which death rates fall over time.
The results do not point in one direction. The report says the data do not support a broad conclusion that improvement assumptions have uniformly risen or fallen. Some short-term results suggest caution. Longer-term medians are stable or higher in several life and annuity categories, depending on product, function and attained age.
For competitive positioning, that spread is the key point. Two insurers can look at the same recent experience and set different long-run assumptions. The survey does not say how those differences feed into specific prices. That link is an inference for readers to test, not a finding of the report.
The framework behind the numbers looks steadier than the numbers themselves. According to the report, the level of assumptions changed for some companies, but the underlying structure stayed remarkably consistent. Companies continue to vary assumptions mainly by attained age and gender.
Durational mortality improvement assumptions remain widely used, but not universally. These assumptions change with the time since the projection start. Use is highest for life products and somewhat lower for annuity products.
COVID-19 is no longer seen as the dominant long-term driver of mortality change, the report says, but its effect has not disappeared. Fewer than half of respondents who answered the question apply explicit COVID-19 or post-pandemic adjustments to underlying mortality rates. The report also says companies are still incorporating post-pandemic experience into forward-looking assumptions.
On what drives improvement, respondents continue to name cancer and cardiovascular disease. Longer-term expectations give more attention to medical and technological advances. The report lists personalized medicine, artificial intelligence, genetics and aging research. These are views from survey respondents. The report does not show that such advances will deliver gains.
Respondents also flagged risks on the other side. The drivers of deterioration they named most often were obesity, mental health or depression, and socioeconomic inequality.
The survey reflects what insurers say they do, not how their assumptions have performed. Readers weighing life, annuity or pension risk transfer pricing should treat it as a map of current practice. It is not a forecast of mortality.
What to watch next
Whether the gap between cautious short-term views and steadier long-term medians narrows in future survey rounds, and whether more companies adopt or drop explicit post-pandemic adjustments.
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