Mortality trends and how they move life insurance prices

Life insurance prices rest on expected death rates, so when people live longer or die less often than assumed, prices for new policies can fall, and when deaths run above expectations, prices can rise. The link is slow and indirect: insurers price from the experience of people they have insured, not from the general population, and they change prices in small steps backed by years of data.

What the national data show

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics published Mortality in the United States, 2024 (NCHS Data Brief 548) in January 2026. It reported:

• Life expectancy at birth was 79.0 years in 2024, up 0.6 year from 78.4 in 2023, the highest the agency has recorded.
• Female life expectancy was 81.4 years and male 76.5 years.
• The age-adjusted death rate fell 3.8%, from 750.5 to 722.1 deaths per 100,000 people.
• Deaths with COVID-19 as the underlying cause fell 37.1%, from 49,932 in 2023 to 31,426 in 2024. The CDC attributed the increase in life expectancy largely to decreases in deaths from unintentional injuries, COVID-19, heart disease, cancer and homicide.

The Social Security Administration publishes a period life table that insurers and planners use for a long view. The SSA's 2023 period table, used in the 2026 Trustees Report, shows a man at 65 expecting 18.12 more years and a woman 20.66 (SSA period life table). It also shows the age gradient behind pricing: a man aged 35 has about a 3.1% chance of dying within 10 years, against about 7.2% at 50.

One caution about reading these numbers: they describe the whole population, including people with conditions that would not pass underwriting. Insured lives die less often than that, which is why term insurance prices are lower than the table might suggest. They also describe an average year, not any individual.

How mortality turns into a price

The guide to how life insurance premiums are calculated explains the pieces. For mortality specifically:

1. Insurers start from industry tables. A mortality table gives the death rate by age. Regulators set minimum tables for reserves and minimum nonforfeiture values, now the 2017 CSO table for policies issued on or after January 1, 2020, but those are conservative regulatory floors, not prices. See CSO mortality table.
2. They adjust for their own insured experience. Companies study actual claims by age, sex, risk class, policy duration and underwriting method, and update their assumptions. Reinsurers, who share the risk on many policies, bring data from many companies.
3. They apply mortality improvement. If death rates are falling over time, an insurer pricing a 20-year policy can assume lower death rates in the future than today's table shows. The assumption is a judgment: it is a bet that the trend will continue. Getting it wrong is costly in both directions, which is why actuaries move gradually.
4. They add margins. The price includes margin for claims higher than expected. See actuary.

Why prices don't track headlines

• Lag. The data an insurer has is years old by the time a price is filed. Life tables are published one to three years after the period they describe.
• Mix. The death-rate trend among all Americans includes causes (drug overdoses, firearm deaths, some chronic diseases) that affect insured groups differently. The people who buy individually underwritten policies are healthier, wealthier and better educated than average, and their mortality has often moved differently.
• Competition and costs. Prices also respond to competition, investment returns (how interest rates affect life insurance prices), expenses and the volume of sales.
• Guarantees. A policy you already own has a fixed price (term and most whole life) or a price within contractual maximums (universal life), so national mortality news does not change it.

Shocks and slow trends

A pandemic or other sudden shock moves claims quickly, but pricing for long policies reflects long-run assumptions, so a short spike usually does not reprice them much. The CDC figures above show how quickly COVID-19 deaths fell after the peak years. See Does life insurance cover death from COVID-19 or another pandemic? for what policies do and don't pay in a pandemic.

Slow trends can matter more over time: improvements in heart disease and cancer treatment, rising obesity and diabetes, drug overdose deaths, and new medications. New drugs show how underwriting can lag behind medicine; see GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and life insurance underwriting for how insurers are treating these weight-loss and diabetes drugs.

Another factor is how insurers collect health information. Programs that skip the medical exam rely on data and models, and the mortality of people approved that way is watched closely; see accelerated underwriting: approval without an exam. If actual deaths run above the model's expectations, insurers tighten rules or raise prices for that route.

What this means for you

• Do not wait for a better rate. A small fall in national death rates will not offset the effect of getting a year older. The SSA data show that the 10-year death chance at 50 is more than double that at 35. See the cost of waiting to buy life insurance.
• Your own health is the bigger lever. Your rate class reflects your numbers, not the country's. See ways to lower your life insurance premiums.
• Use the odds, not the average. The odds of outliving your term shows the chance you outlive a term using general-population data, and the life expectancy calculator estimates a planning horizon. Both are rough guides, not predictions.
• Check what is guaranteed on any non-term policy: with universal life, mortality worse than the insurer expected is the risk behind universal life cost-of-insurance increases and what to do.

Key takeaways

• Prices follow expected deaths among insured people, with a lag of years, so national life expectancy affects them only slowly.
• CDC reported U.S. life expectancy of 79.0 years in 2024, up from 78.4 in 2023, with COVID-19 deaths falling 37.1%.
• Insurers use industry tables, their own claims and reinsurer data, plus an assumption about future improvement.
• Your age and health move your premium far more than national mortality trends do.
• Existing term and whole life premiums are fixed; flexible-premium policies carry some risk of charge increases.