Insurance & Actuarial7 min read

Mortality Improvement Trends in the Post-Pandemic Era

By Jonas Adam Mohamed Osman, known as Yonas Osman

CEO of Quantica Risk

60 Rue François Ier, 75008 Paris, France

Published 15 October 2026

What post-pandemic mortality data reveals about long-term improvement trends, and how insurers should adjust life and annuity pricing assumptions.

Executive answer

Mortality improvement assumptions, the projected annual rate at which death rates at each age decline over time, sit at the heart of pricing and reserving for both life insurance and annuity products, and the pandemic has complicated what was already a difficult actuarial judgement. Excess mortality during 2020-2022, followed by a slower-than-expected return to pre-pandemic trend lines in several developed markets, has forced actuaries to reassess whether the long-term improvement trend itself has shifted, not just experienced a temporary shock.

The direction of this reassessment matters enormously for product pricing: life insurers benefit from higher near-term mortality assumptions reducing reserves, while annuity writers and pension schemes benefit from lower assumed future mortality improvement reducing the duration of expected payment streams, creating opposing commercial incentives that actuaries must set aside in favour of objective assumption-setting.

Post-pandemic excess mortality persistence

Several national statistics offices and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' Continuous Mortality Investigation have documented that all-cause mortality in multiple developed markets remained above pre-pandemic trend lines well into 2023-2024, a period well beyond the acute pandemic phase, raising the question of whether this reflects lingering long COVID health effects, delayed diagnosis and treatment of other conditions during pandemic-era healthcare disruption, or a combination of factors not yet fully understood.

Cardiovascular and metabolic disease mortality in particular has shown persistent elevation in some markets, which actuaries have linked tentatively to delayed routine care during 2020-2021 rather than a direct pandemic mechanism, though the evidence base continues to develop and definitive causal attribution remains elusive. This uncertainty itself is an important input to assumption-setting: a wide range of plausible explanations argues for maintaining a broader uncertainty margin around near-term mortality assumptions than firms applied before 2020.

Implications for long-term improvement trend assumptions

The central actuarial question is whether the long-term mortality improvement trend, historically averaging roughly 1-2% per year in many developed markets before recent deceleration, has permanently shifted downward, or whether current excess mortality is a transient disruption after which improvement resumes its prior trajectory. Pre-pandemic deceleration in mortality improvement, observed in the UK and US from around 2011 onward and often attributed to slowing cardiovascular mortality gains and rising obesity-related conditions, complicates this picture further since the baseline trend was already weaker than the strong improvement rates of the 1980s-2000s.

Most actuarial bodies have recommended a cautious, evidence-led approach: incorporating recent excess mortality data into near-term assumptions while avoiding overreaction that extrapolates a short, unusual period too far into long-term projections. The CMI's published mortality projection models have been updated repeatedly since 2020 specifically to give users more flexibility in weighting pandemic-period data, reflecting the actuarial profession's own uncertainty about how much weight this period deserves.

Pricing and reserving implications

Life insurers repricing protection products should reflect updated near-term mortality experience in pricing bases while being cautious about over-extrapolating a short post-pandemic data window into assumptions that will apply to policies with multi-decade durations. Experience investigations comparing actual to expected mortality by cause of death, where data permits, give more insight than simple all-cause comparisons, since they can distinguish temporary elevated risk, like remaining COVID mortality, from potentially more persistent elevated risk in specific disease categories.

Annuity and pension liability valuations face the opposite commercial pressure but the same technical challenge: understating future mortality improvement would understate liabilities, so actuaries must resist pressure to adopt conservative-looking but ultimately unjustified low improvement assumptions simply because they reduce reported liabilities in the near term. Both sides of the market benefit from transparent, well-documented assumption-setting processes that can withstand audit and supervisory scrutiny regardless of which direction the commercial incentive points.

Conclusion

Post-pandemic mortality data has added genuine uncertainty to an area of actuarial judgement that was already evolving before 2020, and the honest answer is that several more years of data are needed before the persistence of current excess mortality trends can be confidently assessed. In the meantime, actuaries should favour transparent, well-documented assumption ranges over false precision.

The commercial incentives pulling life and annuity assumptions in opposite directions make independent, evidence-based assumption review more valuable than ever during this period of genuine uncertainty. Jonas Adam Mohamed Osman, CEO of Quantica Risk, approaches post-pandemic mortality assumption reviews by examining cause-of-death experience data wherever available, rather than relying on all-cause mortality trends alone.

Primary sources

mortality improvementlife insuranceannuity pricinglongevity