Wink recently published its U.S. individual life insurance sales report for the third quarter of 2025.
Sales of all individual life products rose 3.2% from the total recorded in the third quarter of 2024, to $2.8 billion. Sales of one closely watched product, indexed universal life policies, increased 2.6%, year over year, to $768 million.
The backdrop: IUL policies are permanent life insurance products that build cash value over time and have a crediting rate that can be tied to the performance of one or more market indexes.
Life insurance professionals frequently clash over IUL policies on LinkedIn and elsewhere because of concerns that, even though the issuers almost always make good on the terms of the policies, some agents give consumers unrealistic ideas about how the products might work, partly because the agents themselves have a hard time understanding how they might perform.
In some cases, people like NASCAR racer Kyle Busch who used borrowed money to pay for IUL policies have suffered enormous losses due to gaps between how they thought the policies would behave and how the policies actually behaved.
Regulators have tried to address the concerns by imposing and updating IUL marketing standards. Some firms have developed digital modeling tools to help consumers see how the policies might work in many different scenarios.
Advocates argue that, when IUL policies are properly explained, used and tracked, they can provide a good combination of protection against investment-market-related losses, opportunity for increases in the crediting rate when investment markets do well, a death benefit and the ability to manage income tax obligations.
In some cases, high-income, tax-sensitive people may use IUL policies in place of annuities or bare investment funds to fund retirement planning and other long-term planning arrangements.
See the accompanying gallery for a look at the five life insurers with the top IUL sales in the third quarter.
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