The UK’s oldest population is growing faster than the insurance industry’s ability to fund it. New official figures show the number of centenarians has nearly doubled in twenty years, and one leading consultancy says the profession is still working out its role in filling the care gap that longer lives create.
There were an estimated 16,400 centenarians in the UK in 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics, up 20% since 2015 and 90% since 2005. An estimated 645,000 people were aged 90 and over, up 55% in the same twenty-year period. Men are closing the gap: the number of male centenarians rose 47% in a decade, from 2,100 to almost 3,100, while the number of women grew 15%.
Cara Spinks, head of life and health at Broadstone, said the figures present “significant challenges for the state, insurers and pension providers.”
“People are living longer in retirement, which means retirement savings need to last for longer and greater thought needs to be given to how individuals can maintain financial security later in life. At the same time, insurers and pension providers must continue to adapt their products, pricing and risk management to reflect improving longevity,” she said.
Spinks said longevity projections are only part of the problem. “As more people live into very old age, the challenge is not simply how long retirement income needs to last, but how later-life health and care needs will be funded,” she said. The actuarial profession, she added, is increasingly modelling future care costs and examining how insurance, pensions and other private provision could complement state support.
That pressure is already visible in insurers’ data. UK mortality is running at a record nine-month low, as IB UK reported this month, pushing up the life expectancy projections that feed annuity pricing and reserving. Products designed around average life expectancies are increasingly being stress-tested against a population where living into a second century is becoming statistically routine rather than exceptional.
For life, protection and employee benefits brokers, the figures point to where client conversations are heading. A client who reaches 65 today in reasonable health has a realistic prospect of living into their 90s. Retirement income products address part of that picture. Care annuities, later-life lending, long-term care policies, and critical illness cover extending into later life address a different and largely underdiscussed part of it.
The industry does not yet have a settled answer to who pays for the final years of a life that runs to 100. But brokers who raise the question now - before a client faces it as an emergency rather than a planning decision - are better placed to provide genuine advice rather than a retrospective product.
