The Actuaries Longevity Illustrator is a free tool from the Society of Actuaries and the American Academy of Actuaries that shows individuals and couples their probability of living to specific ages, such as 80, 85, 90, and 95, rather than a single life-expectancy figure. A 65-year-old man has roughly a 25% chance of living past 90 (SSA, 2023 Period Life Table), and the tool exists to show that tail, not just the average.

Reviewing longevity risk disclosures and mortality-improvement scale updates over the past several cycles, the pattern that keeps recurring is that consumers, and a fair number of advisors, anchor on the median life expectancy figure and stop there. A 65-year-old today does not die at the median; roughly half of the cohort lives longer, and it is the joint probability that at least one member of a couple lives well beyond 90 that actually drives the retirement income problem. That is precisely the gap the Actuaries Longevity Illustrator, or ALI, was built to close, and it is worth understanding exactly what it asks for, what it returns, and where its output should and should not be trusted as a planning input.

What the Tool Asks For

The ALI, hosted at longevityillustrator.org, collects a small set of inputs per person. For an individual, that means current age, gender, smoking status (current smoker, former smoker within the past five years, or non-smoker), and self-reported health status on a scale from excellent to poor. For a couple, the tool repeats the identical set of questions for a second person and layers on a joint calculation. There is no income, asset, spending, or portfolio data entered anywhere in the process; the ALI is a mortality-probability engine, not a financial plan.

The tool was originally launched in 2016 and relaunched with a mobile-friendly interface on June 25, 2024, a redesign the Academy and SOA described as making longevity risk easier to visualize on a phone rather than only at a desktop (SOA/Academy, June 2024). The American Academy of Actuaries, which represents more than 20,000 members, and the Society of Actuaries, with more than 32,000 members, jointly maintain the tool as a public-interest resource, not a lead-generation product for either organization (SOA/Academy press release, 2024).

Reading the Output: A Distribution, Not a Point Estimate

The core output is a table and chart of cumulative survival probability at a series of ages, typically 80, 85, 90, and 95, alongside an expected additional-years figure. That combination matters because life expectancy and longevity risk are different concepts that the ALI is explicitly designed to separate. Life expectancy is the statistical average outcome for someone with the user's age, gender, smoking, and health profile; longevity risk is the real and commonly underestimated chance of living well beyond that average, and it is the tail of the distribution, not its center, that determines whether a retirement plan actually survives the retiree.

A plan built to fund only to a median life expectancy is, by construction, designed to run out of money for roughly half of the people who use it. The Society of Actuaries' own period life table work illustrates the scale of the tail: a 65-year-old man should plan for at least age 90, and a 65-year-old woman for at least 92, because roughly 25% of each group lives past those ages using the Social Security Administration's period life table data underlying the 2026 Trustees Report (SSA, 2023 Period Life Table). That is not an edge case. A one-in-four chance of needing 25 or more years of retirement income after age 65 is a mainstream planning scenario, not a tail risk to be dismissed.

The Couples Calculation That Surprises Users

For couples, the ALI adds a second layer that Lisa Schilling, director of the SOA Research Institute, has specifically called out as the tool's most counterintuitive output: "This illustrator prompts couples to consider and plan for longevity risk. 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 or a certain number of years after retirement" (Schilling, SOA/Academy, June 2024). The mechanism is straightforward probability arithmetic, but it is rarely intuitive to a household planning around two individual life-expectancy numbers.

Using the SSA's roughly 25% figures above as an illustration, a mixed-sex couple where each partner independently has about a 25% chance of surviving past their respective 90/92 milestone age has a combined probability of at least one partner clearing that bar of approximately 44%, not 25% (1 minus 0.75 times 0.75). That nearly doubles the effective planning horizon a household should budget against relative to either individual's own number, and it is the reason a couple's joint income need, whether from a portfolio, a pension, or an annuity, should be sized against the joint survival curve rather than either spouse's individual life expectancy. Linda Stone, the Academy's senior retirement fellow, framed the stakes in similar terms when the 2024 redesign launched: "Highlighting longevity risk in retirement and providing an easy-to-use tool to aid consumers in making informed decisions is an important way for us to contribute to the public interest on behalf of our profession" (Stone, SOA/Academy, June 2024).

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 ALI screenshot; the tool applies the same joint-survival logic to the specific ages, sexes, health status, and smoking history a user enters.

Where the Underlying Mortality Assumptions Come From

The ALI's probabilities are not invented for the tool; they are built from the same actuarial infrastructure that prices annuities and funds pension plans. The base mortality tables draw on Social Security Administration experience, and the SOA and Academy have updated that foundation twice on the public record. The 2019 refresh moved the underlying data to more current Social Security Administration mortality tables and updated the projection scale from MP-2015 to MP-2018, alongside revised smoking- and health-status adjustment factors (SOA, 2019). Lisa Schilling summarized the reason for the update bluntly at the time: "It's very risky to consider just one point in time for how long you'll live" (Schilling, SOA, 2019).

The SOA's mortality-improvement research has continued to move since that 2019 update. The current prospective improvement scale, MP-2021, was published in October 2021 and remains the scale referenced across the SOA's individual life and pension valuation work; per the Treasury's 2024 final regulations, defined-benefit pension valuations dated on or after January 1, 2024 apply an adjusted version of that scale capped at 0.78% annual improvement under SECURE 2.0 (Federal Register, October 2023). That same improvement-scale infrastructure, and the question of when the SOA's Retirement Plan Experience Committee will next revise it for post-pandemic mortality data, is the subject of the site's 2026 Mortality Improvement Model coverage; the ALI sits downstream of the same actuarial machinery, applied to consumer-facing retirement planning rather than reserve valuation.

From Survival Curve to Decision

The Academy and SOA are explicit that the ALI is an educational tool, not financial advice; it models mortality probability only; it does not touch assets, spending, taxes, portfolio returns, or Social Security benefit amounts. That is a deliberate scope limitation, and it means the output requires a second step: translating a survival curve into an actual retirement decision. Three specific applications follow directly from the tool's output.

Stress-Testing a Withdrawal Rate

A withdrawal rate built around median life expectancy, say, planning a portfolio to last 20 years for a 65-year-old with a life expectancy around 85, will fail for the substantial share of retirees who live longer than that. The correct use of the ALI's output is to read the survival probability at a high percentile, not the median, and to size the withdrawal rate or the funding horizon against that later age. A retiree using the ALI who sees a 25% or greater chance of living to 90 or beyond should stress-test a 25-year, not a 20-year, spending plan; a couple who sees a roughly 44% joint chance of at least one partner reaching that age has an even stronger case for the longer horizon, given that a plan failing at year 21 fails at the worst possible moment, when the survivor is oldest and least able to adjust.

The Case for Guaranteed Lifetime Income

A high survival probability at older ages is also the core actuarial argument for annuitizing at least a portion of retirement savings. Annuity carriers pool exactly this longevity risk across a large population, which is why an individual retiree cannot self-insure the tail of their own survival distribution as efficiently as an insurer can pool it across thousands of contracts. The annuity market itself reflects sustained demand for that pooling: U.S. annuity sales reached $104.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the tenth consecutive quarter above the $100 billion mark (LIMRA, Q1 2026), a run driven in no small part by retirees and near-retirees responding to exactly the longevity math the ALI surfaces. The gap is not on the demand side alone; it also shows up in plan design, where fewer than one in ten defined-contribution plans currently offers an in-plan annuity option despite nine in ten sponsors agreeing that lifetime income is a core purpose of a 401(k) (MetLife, 2026), a structural lag covered in more detail in the site's DC plan in-plan annuity adoption analysis.

Delaying a Social Security Claim

The ALI's survival curve is also the cleanest available argument for delaying a Social Security claim past full retirement age. Each year of delay between full retirement age and age 70 adds an 8% delayed retirement credit to the eventual monthly benefit, compounding to as much as a 24% to 32% larger check at 70 depending on a claimant's specific full retirement age (SSA). That credit is, in effect, priced against average life expectancy; it becomes a substantially better trade for anyone whose personal survival probability, as read off the ALI's own curve, sits above the population median, which by definition includes every user who sees a meaningfully-above-25% chance of reaching 90. A retiree in excellent health with no smoking history who sees a materially higher-than-average survival curve on the tool has a correspondingly stronger actuarial case for delaying a claim, independent of any liquidity need that might argue the other way.

What the Tool Deliberately Leaves Out

The ALI's narrow scope is a feature, not an oversight, but it means the output alone cannot close every retirement-income question. It has no dedicated long-term-care module, and living longer is correlated with, though not identical to, needing extended care: 70% of adults who survive to age 65 go on to develop severe long-term-services-and-supports needs before death, and 48% receive some paid care over their lifetime, including 28% who receive at least 90 days of nursing home care (HHS/ASPE). A retiree who reads a high survival probability off the ALI's curve should treat that as a signal to size an LTC reserve or LTC insurance decision separately, using morbidity data rather than mortality data, not as evidence the LTC question can be skipped. The tool also does not model investment sequence-of-returns risk, inflation, taxes, or the specific benefit formula of a given Social Security claiming strategy; those require a separate financial-planning tool or an advisor, and the Academy and SOA say as much on the site itself. Used correctly, the ALI answers one question precisely: what is the probability distribution of how long this specific person, or this specific couple, will live. Every downstream financial decision, the withdrawal rate, the annuitization share, the claiming age, the long-term-care reserve, is a separate calculation that takes that distribution as an input rather than a finished answer.

Why This Matters for Practicing Actuaries

For actuaries advising clients, building consumer-facing tools, or communicating pension and annuity risk to lay audiences, the ALI is a useful reference point precisely because it is built on the same mortality infrastructure, Social Security Administration base tables projected with an SOA improvement scale, that underlies VM-20 reserves and pension risk transfer pricing. A practitioner who wants to explain to a client or a plan sponsor why a single life-expectancy number understates funding risk has, in the ALI, a public, free, credentialed tool that makes the tail-risk argument visually rather than through a reserve memo. The tool's design choice to separate mortality probability from financial modeling is also a useful template: it forces the analytical honesty of stating clearly what a mortality model does and does not answer, a discipline that is easy to blur when a single tool tries to do both at once.

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