Defined terms for the annuity market and lifetime income landscape.
A mortality table is a tabular record of age-specific death and survival rates for a defined population, used as the foundational reference structure for actuarial pricing, life expectancy calculation, and survival probability projection across lifetime income arrangements.
A period life table is a mortality table constructed from mortality rates observed across all ages within a single calendar year or short window, treating those rates as the mortality experience of a hypothetical cohort that lives entirely under that period's conditions.
A projected mortality table is a mortality table that combines a base table of observed mortality rates with an improvement scale of assumed future mortality decline, producing the mortality assumption that actuarial pricing and projections actually apply to forward-looking calculations.
A select and ultimate mortality table is a mortality table in which the mortality rate depends on both current age and time since underwriting selection, with a lower-mortality select period reflecting recent screening and a higher-mortality ultimate period reflecting unselected long-run experience.
Senescence, in cellular biology, is the state in which cells stop dividing but remain metabolically active and continue to influence surrounding tissue, while in broader usage the term refers more generally to the aging of organisms over time.
