U.S. life insurers received a flood of applications for individual life insurance from consumers ages 71 and older in December.
Older consumers' life policy application count increased 67.5% between December 2024 and December 2025, according to new data from MIB Group.
For people in that age group, application activity increases widened throughout 2025.
What it means: Many insurance agents are licensed to sell both Medicare plans and life insurance policies.
Life insurance sales to older consumers may have increased so much partly because of agent awareness of severe turmoil and sales commission cuts in the Medicare plan market.
Some agents may have tried to make up for an expected drop in Medicare plan revenue by selling older consumers more life insurance.
MIB: MIB is a Braintree, Massachusetts-based organization that helps life insurers share information used in the underwriting process. It bases its application activity reports on the volume of applications passing through its application-checking systems.
MIB does not publish the actual application volume figures.
LIMRA reported that life insurers with an 82% share of the U.S. individual life market sold about 3.3 million policies in the first three quarters of 2025, implying that the full policy sales count for the first three quarters was about 4 million.
Overall application activity: MIB found that application activity was strong in December 2025, the fourth quarter of 2025 and the full year for all sectors of the individual life market that it tracks.
Overall application activity increased 22% in December 2025 compared with December 2024, and activity increased 15% in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the fourth quarter of 2024.
Full-year activity was up 6.8%.
By age group: Here's how December activity grew year on year, for each age group MIB tracks:
0-30: Up 14.7%.
31-50: Up 15.4%.
41-60: Up 24.6%.
61-70: Up 40.2%.
71+: Up 67.5%.
Products: Application activity for 2025 was up 17.5% for term life insurance policies, 15.8% for whole life policies and 9.4% for universal life policies, according to MIB.
The number of term life applications submitted by people of all ages increased more than 10% between 2024 and 2025. For people ages 71 and older, the number of term life applications was more than twice as high in 2025 as in 2024.
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