Key Takeaways
- The NAIC Life Actuarial (A) Task Force heard a Society of Actuaries presentation on mortality improvement data on June 18 — the most recent step in an ongoing deliberation about whether to update the Valuation Basic Table that underpins pricing for every U.S. life insurance policy.
- If NAIC adopts a new mortality table that reflects post-COVID improvement patterns, term life rates for younger, healthier applicants could decrease; rates for older age bands may move in the opposite direction depending on how the data reads.
- The 2027 Valuation Manual, which would carry any new mortality table provisions, is scheduled for adoption at NAIC’s 2026 Summer National Meeting — meaning any pricing change would be on a roughly 12-18 month implementation horizon.
- Buyers shopping for term life now are locking in pricing under the current 2017 CSO table. If a new table is adopted and carriers adjust, today’s preferred-plus rates may look different a year from now. Locking in coverage sooner rather than waiting on a potential rate drop is almost always the lower-risk move.
What the NAIC’s June 18 Meeting Actually Covered
The NAIC Life Actuarial (A) Task Force, LATF, convened a public meeting on June 18, 2026, with two items on the agenda: a Society of Actuaries presentation on historical and future mortality improvement, and a status update on Actuarial Guideline 55 report reviews. Neither item generates a press release. Both matter more than the announcements that do.
Mortality improvement is the rate at which Americans are dying more slowly over time. It sounds abstract until you understand what it governs: the Valuation Basic Table, or VBT, is the actuarial mortality dataset that carriers use to set minimum reserves and price individual life insurance policies. When the SOA presents mortality improvement data to LATF, it’s presenting the input that will eventually determine whether NAIC updates the table that every life insurer in the country calibrates to.
The current table, formally the 2017 Commissioners Standard Ordinary (2017 CSO), replaced the 2001 CSO and has governed life insurance pricing since its mandatory implementation date. LATF has been deliberating a potential update for over a year. The April 16, 2026 LATF agenda specifically listed “Discuss SOA VBT Decision Points” with an accompanying American Council of Life Insurers comment letter, confirming that the question of whether to initiate a new table update is active, not hypothetical. The June 18 presentation was the SOA’s opportunity to show LATF where mortality trends have gone since the 2017 CSO was built.
The SOA’s mortality improvement work sits inside its Mortality and Longevity Oversight Advisory Council, which has been compiling post-pandemic mortality data to determine whether actual insured-population mortality has shifted enough to warrant a new table. This is the process LATF is monitoring. The 2027 Valuation Manual, which would carry any adopted changes, is scheduled for approval at NAIC’s 2026 Summer National Meeting.
Why a Mortality Table Update Affects What You Pay
If you’re shopping for best term life insurance right now, the 2017 CSO is the invisible foundation under every rate quote you’re seeing. Carriers build their pricing from the table up: expected claims costs by age and sex, plus expenses and profit margin. When the table changes, pricing moves, sometimes in favor of buyers, sometimes against them, depending on which age bands the data shows most improvement.
Here’s what the data direction tends to mean. Post-pandemic mortality research has shown a complex picture. COVID-era excess mortality elevated death rates for working-age Americans from roughly 2020 through 2022. Since then, some improvement has resumed, but not uniformly across all ages. Younger age bands, particularly the 25-to-45 cohort that drives most term life sales, have seen meaningful mortality improvement. Older age bands have been more mixed. If a new VBT reflects better-than-expected improvement in younger cohorts, carriers could lower rates for that group. If older-age data is less favorable than the 2017 CSO assumed, rates in those age bands could rise.
The September 2025 SOA mortality improvement scale recommendation, the most recent published guidance for use with life insurance valuation under VM-20, gives LATF the updated numbers to compare against the 2017 CSO assumptions. That comparison is what the June 18 presentation was built around.
I spent nine years writing and placing life insurance before moving to coverage. The thing most buyers don’t understand is that the rate quote they get isn’t just about their health history. Carriers price to a mortality table, and the table sets the floor. When a carrier pulls its underwriting guide and sees that a 35-year-old preferred-plus male should cost roughly X per thousand of death benefit under the current CSO, that number traces back to regulatory actuarial work done years earlier. Preferred-plus still requires the full stack, no nicotine for five or more years, clean family history, BMI under 28, no DUIs in seven years, no hazardous-activity flags, but even a clean applicant gets priced against the baseline the table sets. A new table shifts that baseline for everyone.
To put a real number on it: under current 2017 CSO pricing, a healthy 35-year-old male in preferred-plus class pays roughly $28 to $32 per month for a 20-year, $500,000 term policy, depending on carrier. If mortality improvement data supports a table revision that moves expected claims costs down for that age band by even 4 to 5 percent, a carrier repricing on a new table could drop that to $27 or $28 at the competitive end. The consumer-facing movement is modest per policy. Across a carrier’s entire in-force block and new-business pricing, the reserve and pricing implications are substantial.
The Timeline and What LATF Still Needs to Decide
This process does not move fast. The NAIC LATF meets weekly on public calls, the next scheduled call after June 18 is June 25, the same day this article publishes, and the mortality table deliberation competes with a full docket. LATF is simultaneously managing VM-22 amendments for non-variable annuities, the CSO clarification adopted on June 11 (APF 2026-04), the AG55 report review updates heard on June 18, and various other Valuation Manual amendments headed toward the 2026 Summer National Meeting.
The “decision points” framing from the April 16 LATF agenda is the key phrase. LATF has not yet committed to building a new table. The question before the task force is whether the divergence between actual mortality experience and the 2017 CSO assumptions is large enough to justify the multi-year undertaking that a new table requires. The 2017 CSO took the SOA and the actuarial community roughly four years to develop from inception to mandatory implementation. A 2026-or-2027 decision to proceed would put a new CSO on a timeline extending well into the next decade.
For now, what you’re quoted under the best life insurance products currently available reflects 2017 CSO assumptions. That table is not going away in 2026. But NAIC watching mortality trend data and formally deliberating a VBT update is the upstream regulatory process that will eventually reset pricing for every carrier writing individual life business in the United States.
The IUL market should pay particular attention. LIMRA’s Q1 2026 preliminary survey showed IUL new premium at $1.1 billion in the first quarter, a 14% gain over the prior year, with IUL representing 25% of total individual life new annualized premium. IUL pricing is sensitive to cost-of-insurance assumptions, which trace directly to the mortality table. A new VBT that shifts COI rates for any age band will work through IUL illustration software as carriers update their products. Under the AG 49-A illustration framework, with the 2026 consumer-protection disclosure enhancements now in effect, any policy redesign triggered by a new table will require updated illustrated values. The guaranteed column and the projected column will both shift. Ask the agent showing you an IUL to run the guaranteed column alongside any projected figure; that gap tells you the real floor.
The NAIC LATF has another meeting today, June 25. No mortality presentation is listed on the current agenda, but the VBT deliberation is an open item. Watch for the Summer National Meeting materials, which will carry whatever LATF has decided to advance.
