Demographics are destiny — and, for advisors, opportunity

This is an exciting time for the insurance industry.  We’ve experienced strong recent results and the economic backdrop is the strongest we’ve seen in years.

Individual life insurance sales set a record in 2025. Annuity sales also set a record —more than double what they were just a decade ago. Workplace benefits sales came within a whisker of their own record. And as I write this, 2026 is on pace to compete for records in all three.

Layer on an interest-rate environment that has improved markedly since the pandemic, more capital in our business than at any point in its history, and technology — artificial intelligence chief among it — that is opening genuinely new ways to reach and serve people, and the backdrop is about as favorable as I have seen it.

But strength today is no guarantee of relevance tomorrow. Cycles turn. The companies and advisors who make the most of this moment will look past the good numbers and ask a few hard questions: Who are we serving today, and who should we focus on serving tomorrow?

These questions are at the heart of what I shared with the industry at our annual conference this year. To answer them, I found it useful to stop looking a quarter or a year ahead and instead look back—50 years to 1976—because it's easy to miss how much has changed when you live through it day by day.

The country has aged — dramatically

In 1976, roughly 4,800 Americans turned 65 every day. Today that number is about 11,400. The population eligible for Medicare has grown from around 23 million to roughly 66 million — very nearly a tripling. In fact, 2025 was the biggest year on record for Americans reaching 65; it eases only slightly after that. Those are not rounding errors. That is a structural change in the country's population.

And we are not only older — we are living longer. A man reaching 65 today can expect close to 18 years of retirement, up from under 14 in 1976—more than four additional years, roughly a third. A 65-year-old woman today is expected to spend almost 21 years in retirement—up from 18 years in 1976. Reaching 90 is becoming ordinary rather than remarkable. Today, for a couple aged 65, the chances are almost 50% that one will reach age 90.  Longevity risk — the risk of outliving your money — moves from a footnote to the center of the conversation, and protected lifetime income stops being a niche product and becomes a core need.

The customer has changed too

Aging is the most visible shift, but it is not the only one. The country simply looks different than it did 50 years ago. In the mid-1970s, more than 80% of Americans were white; today that share is closer to 56%, with Hispanic Americans now about one-fifth of the population and the Asian American share growing from well under 1% to more than 6%. Households have changed as much as the people in them — nearly half of adults today are unmarried, up from about one-third in 1976.

Here is why that matters for anyone with a book of business: different households make financial decisions differently. The picture many of us carry of the "typical" client — the one we formed 10, 20, 30 years ago — describes a smaller and smaller slice of the real market. For our industry, the growth is in reaching audiences that we may not have historically prioritized, and in understanding how those audiences want to learn, shop and buy.

 What this means for your practice

For advisors, I think the takeaway is genuinely encouraging. Your client base is aging into the years of greatest need—for retirement income, protection, healthcare and caregiving planning—at exactly the moment the tools to serve them at scale are getting better. You don't have to forecast 50 years out to act on this. The demand is already here, arriving at about 11,000 new 65-year-olds a day.

The demographics plainly tell us who our future customers will be. What they cannot tell us is how we best reach them — what products, what mediums and what channels of distribution.

We are at a good point in the cycle. My message to the industry is the oldest one there is: carpe diem. Take advantage of this wonderful environment to reach the people who will benefit most from our industry's products and services.

David Levenson is president and CEO, LIMRA, LOMA and LL Global. He may be contacted at david.levenson@innfeedback.com.