LIMRA Q1 2026: Life Premium Jumps 10% While Annuity Sales Near Record

LIMRA's Q1 2026 survey results put individual life new annualized premium plus excess at $4.5 billion, up 10%, and total annuity sales at $104.6 billion, 2% below the all-time first-quarter record and the tenth consecutive quarter above $100 billion. The annuity headline reads as a flat quarter. Underneath it the product mix moved by twenty points of growth spread, and that shift is what changes the balance sheet.

Key Takeaways

• $104.6 billion in annuity sales, 2% below the Q1 2025 record, extending a streak of ten consecutive quarters above $100 billion that began in Q4 2023.
• Fixed-rate deferred fell 16% to $34.0 billion from $40.4 billion while RILA rose 21% to $21.2 billion, its 30th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth.
• $4.5 billion in life premium, up 10%, with policy count up 9% and every product line except fixed universal life positive.
• IUL new premium reached $1.1 billion, up 14%, on double-digit policy growth in simplified issue and final expense not seen since the 1990s.
• LDTI remeasurement routinely swings life insurer net income by 10% to 25% after twelve quarters, on a liability that is growing fastest in its most complex products.

The Print

The life side was broad rather than concentrated. Policy count rose 9% across the market and every major product line except fixed universal life posted premium growth.

Product	Q1 2026 Premium	YoY Growth	Policy Count Change	Market Share
Whole Life	$1.6B	+9%	+13%	36%
Indexed Universal Life (IUL)	$1.1B	+14%	+8%	25%
Term Life	$788M	+9%	+5%	18%
Variable Universal Life (VUL)	$729M	+12%	+4%	16%
Fixed Universal Life	$221M	-6%	+5%	5%

Whole life held the largest share at 36% on $1.6 billion, with the strongest policy count gain of any line at 13%. IUL reached $1.1 billion, up 14%, its fourth record year in five, with six of the top ten IUL carriers reporting double-digit growth. Fixed universal life was the single negative, down 6% for a sixth consecutive quarter while its policy count still grew 5%, which is the signature of shrinking face amounts rather than lost customers.

The full-year context is the same shape. Individual life premium topped $17.5 billion in 2025, a record, and annuity sales reached $464.1 billion, a record for the fourth consecutive year.

A Flat Total With a Twenty-Point Spread Inside It

The annuity quarter looks unchanged and is not. The two largest movements ran in opposite directions at similar magnitudes.

Product	Q1 2026 Sales	YoY Change	Key Trend
Fixed-Rate Deferred (FRD)	$34.0B	-16%	Normalizing from rate-lock rush; still one-third of market
Fixed Indexed Annuity (FIA)	$26.6B	-4%	Slight pullback from record pace
RILA	$21.2B	+21%	30th consecutive quarter of YoY growth
Traditional Variable Annuity	$16.1B	+9%	Stabilized after years of secular decline
SPIA	$3.7B	+22%	Income-focused buying accelerates
DIA	$1.0B	+6%	Modest growth from small base

Fixed-rate deferred fell 16%, from $40.4 billion to $34.0 billion, as the rate-lock urgency faded. FRD more than doubled from pre-2022 levels while consumers captured yields above 5%; with the Fed holding and limited cuts priced, that motive is gone, and the product's growth has plateaued at about a third of total volume.

RILA rose 21% to $21.2 billion, its second-highest quarter ever and its 30th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. That is a structural move rather than a rate response: RILA volume has grown roughly tenfold in a decade, from about $24 billion in 2020 to $79.6 billion in 2025, as more carriers entered, buffer and floor structures multiplied, and RIA and fee-based channels gained access.

The consequence is that the same $104.6 billion is a different liability than it was a year ago. On a fixed-rate deferred contract the carrier is principally holding interest rate risk against a general account. On a RILA it is holding equity-linked exposure hedged through call spreads, priced off a volatility surface and an earned-rate budget, as our RILA cap-rate pricing work set out. Six billion dollars migrating from the first to the second in one quarter is a hedging infrastructure question and an equity-rate correlation assumption in the ALM model, neither of which the headline reports.

The income products point the same way from a small base. SPIA rose 22% to $3.7 billion and DIA 6% to $1.0 billion, $4.7 billion combined, against a demographic backdrop of more than 4.1 million Americans turning 65 each year through 2027 and roughly 11,400 a day in 2025. LIMRA finds nearly 6 in 10 Gen X consumers concerned about outliving savings while only 1 in 5 pre-retirees own an annuity.

The Growth Is Landing in the Reserves That Are Hardest to Compute

Volume and valuation workload do not scale together, and the mix shift is the reason.

Every dollar of the $4.5 billion in life premium and the $104.6 billion in annuity sales enters the liability for future policyholder benefits or a market risk benefit calculation. Under LDTI that liability is remeasured quarterly against upper-medium-grade fixed-income yields. After twelve quarters of reporting, those market remeasurements routinely move life insurer net income by 10% to 25%, as our year-three volatility analysis documented.

The quarterly cycle does not scale linearly with volume; it scales with the complexity of the mix. The mix is moving toward indexed structures that require stochastic modeling. VM-22 reserve requirements for indexed products rest on scenario testing, and the Generator of Economic Scenarios framework reaches its field test in Summer 2026, which means the growing indexed block will be reserved on scenario sets whose correlation structures are still being validated.

The rate side compounds it in the other direction. Carriers that wrote large fixed-rate deferred volumes at credited rates above 5% during 2023 and 2024 hold a portfolio drag if new money rates fall. A 50 to 100 basis point decline in reinvestment yields compresses the investment spread materially, most for carriers whose credited rate floors sit near current earned rates. The Federal Reserve held at its April 2026 meeting on an unusual 8-4 vote, and Polymarket traders price a 69% probability of no cuts at all in 2026.

So the balance sheet is being asked to absorb two things at once: a shrinking-but-still-largest fixed book whose spread depends on rates staying where they are, and a fast-growing indexed book whose reserve depends on scenario machinery that is still in field test.