Here’s why one insurer thinks Brits are living longer
Key Points
- L&G says UK death rates fell below pre-pandemic levels in 2025 and kept falling in 2026.
- The insurer names weight-loss drugs, immunology and diagnostics as factors shaping lifespans.
- Medical breakthroughs may force it to adjust its longevity assumptions.
- Those assumptions set the price of annuities, protection cover and pension buyouts.
- L&G does not currently rate climate change as a material longevity risk.
Legal & General says UK death rates fell below pre-pandemic levels during 2025 and have carried on falling through 2026.
The insurer set out the assessment in the risk section of its half-year results on Wednesday (5 August).
It said both the UK and the US recorded elevated mortality in the years that followed the Covid-19 pandemic, and that UK population-level mortality has since dropped back below where it sat before 2020, with variation between different population groups. The company added that uncertainty around the trend remains.
L&G named several factors it expects to shape mortality and illness rates from here. Emerging diseases sit on one side of the ledger.
Advances in immunology, developments in diagnostic technology and weight-loss drugs sit on the other, and the company said medical breakthroughs that improve treatment outcomes may force it to adjust the assumptions it makes about how long customers live.
Cost-of-living pressures and changes in government health and social care spending also feed into the picture.
L&G prices annuities, protection policies and company pension buyouts on estimates of how long people will live, and it holds £73 billion of assets backing incomes for members of pension schemes it has taken on, plus a further £17.9 billion behind individual annuities.
A shift in life expectancy changes what those promises cost to honour, and the company uses reinsurance to limit the effect of significant variations.
The insurer said it does not currently treat climate change or nature loss as material drivers of mortality or longevity risk over the medium term, though it keeps that judgement under review.
