CMI Working Paper 178

Working Paper 178 was published in September 2023. The paper describes the experience of pension annuities in payment in 2019-2022. Values underlying charts and a Tableau workbook, allowing interactive exploration of selected charts are available as accompanying outputs. 

The analyses show that:

• Mortality for both annuitants and the England & Wales population in 2022 appears to be returning to close to pre-pandemic levels, following sharp peaks in 2020 and 2021 SMRs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• Annuitant mortality in 2022 did not follow the typical seasonality trends, with less of a fall in mortality in summer months, compared with 2019.
• For ages 65-95 and both genders combined, SMRs in the England & Wales population were 5.7% higher in 2022 than in 2019. The corresponding figures for the annuitants was lower, at 3.2%.
• When considering mortality by gender, the increase in mortality relative to 2019 has been higher for males than for females in each of 2020, 2021 and 2022 for the England & Wales population, but excess mortality for female annuitants in 2022 was higher than for males. 
• In 2022, SMRs for the England & Wales population saw the largest increase relative to 2019 for ages 85-95, whilst for annuitants the largest increase was seen for ages 65-74. 

There are two outputs that accompany this paper:

• A spreadsheet that includes the values underlying the charts in the working paper.
• A Tableau Workbook, allowing interactive exploration of selected charts in the working paper. Note that this requires access to Tableau Reader; this is free to download at: https://www.tableau.com/products/reader.

Note: this paper and the accompanying outputs are available to Authorised Users only.