Death rates in England and Wales have reached their lowest level on record for the first three quarters of a year, according to the latest update from the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI). Cumulative standardised mortality to September 25 was 6.4% below the ten-year average for 2016 to 2025. The record applies to both males and females across nearly all age groups tracked by the monitor.
The figures extend a trend that has now run for most of the year. Q1 2026 already showed mortality rates lower than any previous first quarter on record, while the H1 update confirmed mortality running 5.4% below the 10-year average through June. The Q3 data, covering week 39 of the year, shows the improvement has held despite summer heatwaves that pushed deaths higher in parts of the period.
COVID-19 deaths have fallen sharply and consistently across the year. There were 944 deaths involving the virus in the first 39 weeks of 2026, against 3,215 in the same period of 2025 and 7,591 in 2024. Influenza and pneumonia deaths also came in below recent years, at around 54,900 compared to a range of roughly 62,900 to 67,500 across the same period in 2023 to 2025. The CMI does not attribute causes to changes in mortality rates, but the concentration of improvement in respiratory categories shows in its data.
Steve Bale, chair of the CMI Mortality Projections Committee, said mortality across the third quarter was at a similarly low level to 2025. "Mortality for the first three quarters of the year is at record low levels in 2026 for most age groups considered in the mortality monitor," he said. The exception is young males, whose mortality remains around 1% above the record low set in 2012, having been rising before the pandemic.
Sustained low mortality feeds directly into longevity risk models, and those models sit at the centre of UK life insurance and pension scheme liability management. The CMI_2025 projections model, published earlier this year, already reflected the 2025 data by lifting life expectancy at age 65 by around eight weeks for males and six weeks for females relative to the prior version.
Scheme liabilities were estimated to increase by around 0.5% for schemes adopting the updated model, according to WTW. If 2026 mortality data continues at its current level, the CMI_2026 model, when published, is likely to face the same upward pressure on life expectancy projections, with corresponding consequences for reserving and pricing.
That pressure lands in an already active market. WTW's 2026 De-risking report forecast total pension risk transfer volumes of approximately £70 billion for the year, including an estimated £50 billion in bulk annuities and up to £20 billion in longevity swaps. Bulk annuity and longevity swap pricing both reference CMI projections, adjusted for each scheme's own experience. A further year of lower-than-expected mortality tightens the assumptions underlying those transactions and raises the present value of guaranteed income streams that insurers and reinsurers have taken on.
