Defined terms for the annuity market and lifetime income landscape.
Mortality improvement is the systematic decline in age-specific mortality rates over successive calendar years, observed across most developed-country populations over the past century and central to projecting future mortality experience.
A mortality improvement scale is a schedule of assumed year-over-year mortality decline at each age, applied to a base mortality table to project how the table's rates are expected to evolve in future calendar years.
Mortality loading is the component of an annuity's pricing that compensates the carrier for the uncertainty in its mortality assumptions and for the cost of holding reserves and capital against the possibility that the priced pool lives longer than the carrier's best estimate projects.
Mortality pooling is the actuarial process by which the shares of pool resources that would have funded continued payments to members who die during the payment period are redistributed to survivors, allowing the pool to deliver higher per-survivor income than each member's contribution alone.
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.
