U.S. sales of individual life insurance increased to $3.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 3.3% from the total for the fourth quarter of 2024, according to new issuer survey data from Wink.
Purchases of whole life policies generated 40% of the premiums from new individual life sales, and purchases of three types of universal life coverage — indexed, fixed and variable universal — accounted for more than 57% of the premiums from new sales.
Whole life policies and all kinds of universal life policies can build cash value.
Term life policies, which build no cash value, attracted just 2.7% of the new premiums.
Issuers achieved the modest gains in overall individual life sales in the face of consumer unease about the economy, some insurers' concerns about exposure to mortality risk, and competition for consumers' and advisors' attention from annuities.
See the accompanying gallery for a look at the five life insurers with the highest amount of new premiums from individual life sales in the fourth quarter.
What it means: U.S. consumers are still buying cash-value life insurance. Advisors interested in holistic planning need to see whether clients have that.
The backdrop: Cryptocurrency, for example, gets more attention, but only about 4.3% of U.S. households reported holding cryptocurrency holdings in 2022, and the median value of the crypto holdings in the households that reported having crypto was just $2,000, according to analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
About 16% of U.S. families had cash-value life insurance. For all families with cash-value life insurance, the median value of the holdings was $9,700. For middle-income families with cash-value life insurance, the average value of the life insurance cash value was $30,900.
In other words: Typical families were much more likely to have cash-value life assets than to have crypto, and the typical value of a family's life insurance policy cash value was much higher than the reported value of the typical crypto stash.
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