THE ARISING · Markets & Strategy
SOA Data Show US Mortality Improving Across All Age Groups
US death rates kept falling in the second quarter of 2026, and no age group bucked the trend. That is the central finding of the latest Society of Actuaries quarterly mortality report, and it bears on how life insurers, annuity writers and pension risk transfer (PRT) providers think about future claims and payouts.
According to the Society of Actuaries (SOA), mortality in Q2 2026 was 2.5% lower than in Q2 2025. The report, published October 15, covers data through June 2026 and draws on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Human Mortality Database.
The age-standardized death rate fell 0.6% between the rolling 12-month periods ending March 2026 and June 2026. It went from 788.4 to 783.5 deaths per 100,000. Age standardization adjusts for changes in the population's age mix. This report uses the 2019 population's age and sex distribution as its standard. Rolling 12-month figures are used because quarterly rates swing with the seasons.
All four age groups in the analysis (0–19, 20–49, 50–59 and 60+) had lower mortality than in the same quarter a year earlier. The 20–49 group improved most, with a 6.1% drop. The source text we reviewed does not give the size of the change for the other groups.
The report itself does not discuss pricing, reserving or PRT. What follows is our interpretation, not the SOA's. Falling death rates generally work in opposite directions for different books. Lower mortality tends to ease death-claim costs for life insurers. It tends to lengthen the expected payout period for annuities and pension liabilities. Pricing and reserving assumptions for each line rest on long-run projections, and one quarter of data does not settle them.
Two cautions apply. First, the SOA says the results are preliminary and may be revised as death counts and population estimates are updated. Second, the largest gain was in ages 20–49. Annuity and PRT liabilities are concentrated in older retirees, so the headline improvement may say less about them than the 60+ figures would. Those figures sit in the SOA's accompanying workbook, which holds data from 2000 through June 2026 by sex, single age and 14 cause-of-death categories.
This is population-level data, which differs from our October 24 coverage of a metaanalysis linking faster epigenetic aging to higher death risk among individual adults. That piece concerned how risk differs between people. This report tracks how death rates are moving across the country as a whole, so the two add to each other rather than overlap.
Next, watch whether the SOA revises the Q2 figures, and whether the next quarterly report shows the rolling 12-month rate continuing to decline.
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