Definition
SOA mortality research is the body of mortality experience studies and table development conducted by the Society of Actuaries, which produces the canonical mortality tables used across US life insurance pricing, pension valuation, and actuarial regulation.
Why it matters
A mortality table is only as credible as the institution that produced it. The Society of Actuaries is the institutional source for most of the mortality tables that govern US lifetime income pricing — the 2017 CSO table for life insurance, the Pri-2012 pension mortality table, the Pub-2010 public-sector pension table, the RP-2014 retirement table, and the MP series of mortality improvement scales. Naming the SOA as the producer makes visible the institutional layer behind tables that often appear as anonymous reference structures.
How it works
The Society of Actuaries is a US-based professional society of actuaries that, among its other functions, conducts mortality experience studies on insured-life, annuitant, and pension populations and publishes mortality tables built from those studies. The experience studies pool data contributed by insurers and pension plans, applied to a credibility-weighting methodology that separates statistically reliable mortality signal from random fluctuation in smaller subgroups. The SOA's principal published tables include the 2017 Commissioners Standard Ordinary (CSO) table — widely used in US life insurance pricing and statutory reserving; the Pri-2012 private-sector pension mortality table set and the Pub-2010 public-sector pension table set — the primary references for US defined benefit pension valuation; the RP-2014 retirement mortality table, a predecessor and continuing reference; and the MP series of mortality improvement scales, currently MP-2021, updated periodically as the underlying experience evolves. Tables published by the SOA become standard references through adoption by the NAIC for life insurance, by the IRS and PBGC for pension valuation, and by the broader actuarial community for annuity and lifetime income pricing.
In practice
For an individual encountering a mortality table reference in any lifetime income context — an annuity quote, a pension valuation, an in-plan illustration — the institutional producer of the table is most often the SOA. The practical relevance is that SOA tables are not opaque proprietary constructions; the experience studies, methodology, and tables themselves are publicly documented and updated on a known schedule, and a professional explaining a pricing assumption can point to the specific SOA publication that supports it. Where alternative mortality bases are in use — carrier-specific experience tables, international tables, or older retired tables — the comparison to the contemporaneous SOA table provides a reference point for evaluating whether the alternative is reasonable.
In the Longevity Standard Framework
SOA mortality research is supporting vocabulary in the Longevity Standard framework as the institutional source of the mortality data and credibility methodology the framework's actuarial model references. The focal model configuration uses a Gompertz mortality assumption with SOA credibility scaling, which combines a parametric survival curve calibrated to contemporary annuitant experience with the SOA credibility-weighting approach used to combine pool-specific experience with broader population mortality. The framework's numerical findings carry the SOA mortality basis implicitly through this configuration; deviating from it — by using a non-annuitant population mortality, a different credibility approach, or a non-SOA table — produces materially different cost-of-income and realized value figures and would be documented as part of any deviating claim's parameter set.
Related terms
- Mortality table
- Period life table
- Projected mortality table
- Mortality improvement scale
- Cohort life table
- Life expectancy
- Actuarial present value
- Pension risk transfer