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U.S. life and annuity issuers let their piles of alternative assets grow faster than the rest of their holdings in 2025.
But most of the issuers' portfolio growth came from increases in the value of bonds, mortgage loans and common stocks, according to an analysis posted by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' Capital Markets Bureau.
The issuers ended the year with $6.1 trillion in assets. The total was $346 billion higher, or 6% higher, than it was a year earlier.
Here's what the value of some of the issuers' holdings looked like at the end of 2025:
Bonds: $4 trillion, or 65.6% of the total. (Up 5.2%, or $198 billion, from the end of 2024.)
Mortgage loans: $833 billion, or 13.7% of the total. (Up 5.8%, or $46 billion.)
Common stocks: $245 billion, or 4% of the total. (Up 9.6%, or $22 billion.)
Cash and cash equivalents: $216 billion, or 3.5% of the total. (Up 9%, or $18 billion.)
The NAIC analysis puts the value of the life and annuity issuers' private equity stakes, private credit assets and other alternative assets in the category for "Schedule BA" assets, meaning that issuers report those assets on the Schedule BA form.
Issuers held $415 billion of assets in that category at the end of 2025. The value increased by 10.7%, or $41 billion, from the total recorded at the end of 2024.
The issuers had 6.8% of their assets in the alternative asset category at the end of 2025, up from 6.5% a year earlier.
What it means: The portfolios supporting retirement savers' annuities and life insurance policies looked about the same in 2025 as in 2024.
The asset changes: The totals in the NAIC asset tables reflect the flow of premium payments and other payments to insurers, insurers' payments to product owners and beneficiaries, and the effects of investment performance.
Rule changes: Michele Wong and Jennifer Vento, the NAIC analysts who created the new report, noted that one reason for the high growth in the Schedule BA asset total is that a change in NAIC rules may have caused insurers to move some investments from the reporting form for bonds to the reporting form for Schedule BA assets.
The backdrop: Life and annuity issuers'
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