CMI Working Paper 215

Working Paper 215 was published in September 2026. This paper describes mortality (including terminal illness), accelerated critical illness and standalone critical illness experience for standard and rated (i.e. policies sold on standard and non-standard rates, respectively) term assurances in the period 2022-2024. Results are compared with the combined 2016-2019 period.

The analyses show:

• Lives-weighted standard lives mortality experience is slightly lighter than the “16” Series mortality term assurances (“T16”) tables and the level is similar across all four sex and smoker subsets. Lives-weighted rated lives experience is considerably lighter than T16; non-smoker experience is heavier than average, and smoker experience is lighter, for both males and females. The corresponding amounts-weighted experience is lighter by around 10% at an overall level, with similar differences for all sex and smoker subsets.
• Lives-weighted standard lives accelerated critical illness experience is heavier than expected under the “16” Series accelerated critical illness (“AC16”) tables, and the corresponding rated lives experience is considerably lighter. Compared with mortality term assurances, there are greater differences between sex and smoker subsets. Amounts-weighted experience is broadly similar to the corresponding lives-weighted experience for standard lives but heavier for rated lives.
• Standalone critical illness experience is compared with the AC16 tables and data volumes are substantially lower than for mortality and accelerated critical illness. At an overall level, lives-weighted standard lives experience is slightly lighter than expected by the tables whereas rated lives experience is substantially lighter. Experience is generally similar by sex and smoker status around those averages, except for male smoker standard lives, which has lighter experience than average.

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

Note: this paper and the spreadsheets available to Authorised Users only.