The Actuaries Longevity Illustrator is a free tool from the Society of Actuaries and the American Academy of Actuaries that returns a probability of living to 80, 85, 90 and 95 rather than a single life-expectancy figure. It exists because the median is the wrong number to plan against. A 65-year-old man has roughly a 25% chance of living past 90 on Social Security Administration period life table data, and a plan funded to the median is built to fail for about half of the people who use it.

Key Takeaways

  • Roughly 25% of 65-year-old men live past 90 and 25% of women past 92, so a one in four chance of needing 25 or more years of retirement income is a mainstream scenario, not a tail case.
  • About 44% is the joint probability that at least one member of a mixed-sex couple clears that milestone, nearly double either individual's 25%, and it is the number a household income plan should be sized against.
  • Zero financial inputs. The tool collects age, gender, smoking status and self-reported health only; it holds no assets, spending, taxes or returns, which is what makes its output an input rather than an answer.
  • $104.6 billion in first-quarter 2026 US annuity sales, a tenth consecutive quarter above $100 billion, is the market-side expression of the same tail the illustrator draws.
  • 70% of adults surviving to 65 go on to develop severe long-term-services-and-supports needs, a morbidity exposure the survival curve prices nothing for.

What the Illustrator Asks and What It Returns

The tool, hosted at longevityillustrator.org, collects four things per person: current age, gender, smoking status (current, former within five years, or never), and self-reported health from excellent to poor. For a couple it repeats the set for a second person and adds a joint calculation. Nothing about income, assets, spending or portfolio return is entered anywhere. It is a mortality-probability engine.

What comes back is a cumulative survival probability at a series of ages alongside an expected additional-years figure, and the pairing is the point. Life expectancy is the average outcome for that profile. Longevity risk is the chance of living well past it, and the tail rather than the center is what determines whether a plan survives the retiree.

The scale of that tail is not marginal. A 65-year-old man should plan to at least 90 and a 65-year-old woman to at least 92, because roughly 25% of each group clears those ages on the SSA period life table data underlying the 2026 Trustees Report.

The probabilities are not invented for the tool. They are built on SSA base tables projected with an SOA improvement scale, the same infrastructure that sits under annuity pricing and pension funding. The 2019 refresh moved the tool to more current SSA tables and from MP-2015 to MP-2018 projection, with revised smoking and health-status adjustment factors. The tool was relaunched with a mobile interface in June 2024.

The Joint-Survival Arithmetic and the Horizon It Buys

The couples calculation is where the output stops being intuitive. Lisa Schilling, director of the SOA Research Institute, called it out at the 2024 relaunch: "We've found that people are often surprised how much greater the chance that at least one of the two of them will live to a given age" (Schilling, SOA/Academy, June 2024).

The arithmetic is elementary and the result is not. If each partner independently has about a 25% chance of clearing their own milestone age, the chance that at least one of them does is 1 minus 0.75 times 0.75, or roughly 44%.

Milestone age (from age 65)Individual probabilityCouple: at least one survives
Man to 90 / Woman to 92 (SSA, illustrative)≈25% each≈44%

Illustrative arithmetic built from the SSA period life table figures above, not a direct tool screenshot; the illustrator applies the same joint-survival logic to the specific ages, sexes, health status and smoking history a user enters.

That near doubling is what changes the funding horizon. A 65-year-old planning a portfolio to last 20 years is planning to a life expectancy near 85; reading 25% at age 90 off the curve makes that a 25-year problem, and reading 44% jointly makes it a 25-year problem for the household even when neither individual's own number says so. A plan that fails in year 21 fails when the survivor is oldest and least able to adjust.

The same curve prices two other decisions. It is the actuarial case for annuitizing part of the balance, because a carrier pools the tail across thousands of contracts and an individual cannot self-insure their own. US annuity sales of $104.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026, a tenth straight quarter over $100 billion, are the demand side of that.

It is also the cleanest argument for delaying a Social Security claim, since each year of delay past full retirement age adds an 8% credit, compounding to 24% to 32% more at 70. That credit is priced against average life expectancy, so it is a better trade for anyone whose own curve sits above the population median.

Surviving Longer Is a Morbidity Problem the Curve Does Not Price

The complication is that the tail the illustrator draws is a mortality tail, and the expensive part of living to 95 is morbidity. HHS and ASPE put the lifetime risk at 70% of adults surviving to 65 developing severe long-term-services-and-supports needs, with 48% receiving some paid care and 28% receiving at least 90 days of nursing home care.

Those two distributions are correlated but not the same, and they run in opposite directions for a retiree. A high survival probability makes the income plan longer and the care exposure larger at the same time, and only the first of those is on the screen. Reading a strong curve and concluding the plan is durable gets the sign right on the mortality half and misses the morbidity half entirely, which has to be sized from morbidity data rather than from the survival table.

The delivery channel for the annuitization answer is also thinner than the arithmetic implies. Fewer than one in ten defined-contribution plans currently offers an in-plan annuity option, even though nine in ten sponsors agree lifetime income is a core purpose of a 401(k), a gap covered in the site's DC plan in-plan annuity adoption analysis. The improvement scale underneath the curve keeps moving too: MP-2021 remains the referenced prospective scale, and defined-benefit valuations dated on or after January 1, 2024 apply an adjusted version capped at 0.78% annual improvement under SECURE 2.0. The curve a user reads today is a projection, and the projection has a revision schedule.

Further Reading

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