CMI Working Paper 176: “All offices” experience of term assurances in 2021

Important note: Since publishing this paper, we have described restated experience for 2021 in Working Paper 191. The commentary in that paper highlighted that the allowances made for late reporting in 2021 in Working Paper 176 were not high enough, particularly for accelerated critical illness. 2021 experience reported in Working Paper 191 is therefore heavier than is shown in this paper. Users are encouraged to refer to the restated figures for 2021 in Working Paper 191. A version of Working Paper 176 issued in June 2024 includes a prominent “health warning”.


Working Paper 176 was published in June 2023. The experience of term assurances in 2021 compared with updated 2020 experience and the combined 2016-2019 period against the “16” Series tables; the results are available in accompanying spreadsheets. An updated version of this paper was released in July 2023. This corrects minor errors in the commentary on Table 8.2 and Charts 5A, 8D and 8H in the original version.

The paper also includes an analysis of monthly experience during 2019, 2020 and 2021.

The analyses show:

  • Mortality in 2021 is around 2% higher than expected under the “16” Series term mortality tables (with no allowance for trends). However, the experience varies by both gender and smoker status.
  • Accelerated critical illness experience in 2021 is 9% lower than expected under the “16” Series term accelerated critical illness tables.
  • Monthly mortality experience is considerably higher during months coinciding with the first and second waves of the pandemic - April 2020 and January 2021. However, the impact varies widely by gender and smoker status.
  • Accelerated critical illness experience decreases substantially during the second quarter of 2020. Experience partially rebounds following this and the experience during the second wave does not seem to be as affected as the first, Experience varies by gender and smoker status with differences arising from varying proportions of deaths to cancer claims among the subsets

There are summary spreadsheets (linked below) for each benefit type – Mortality (DB) and Accelerated Critical Illness (ACI).  Please refer to the paper for more details.

The four sets of Summary results released alongside this paper are:

We have also published a spreadsheet that includes the values used in the charts in the working paper

A Tableau Workbook, allowing interactive exploration of selected charts in the working paper, is available. 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 spreadsheets are available to Authorised Users only.

Events calendar

No results found.