Older Consumers Lead in Life Application Growth: MIB

What You Need to Know

Application activity for consumers ages 30 and under continued to slide.
Activity levels for all older age groups increased.
Big and small policies seemed to be more popular than midsize policies.

Consumers ages 71 and older continued to return to the U.S. individual life insurance market, according to MIB Group Inc.’s new individual life application activity report.

Overall individual life application volume increased 0.5% between June 2020 and June 2021.

That was down from an overall increase of 1.9% in May.

For consumers ages 71 and up, year-over-year growth in the number of individual life applications filed was just 4.3%, down from 5.2% in May.

But the 71-and-up age group showed the strongest application activity performance for the third straight month.

Life Application Activity

MIB is a Braintree, Massachusetts-based consortium that provides underwriting services for member life insurers in the United States and Canada.

MIB does not publish public information about actual life insurance policy sales. It does publish data on trends in the number of applications for medically underwritten policies fed into its verification systems each month.

Age Trends

MIB provides detailed application activity reports for its members. The public report summaries are more general but do offer activity statistics broken down by age group.

Policy Size Trends

MIB did not provide detailed figures concerning the types of products that attracted higher levels of application activity in June, but it said activity levels for policies with death benefits under $250,000 and over $500,000 were higher than in June 2020. The application activity level for policies with death benefits from $250,000 to $500,000 was down.