We're living longer than ever — what does that mean for your cover?

The good news in the numbers

Start with the headline, because it is genuinely good: Irish lives keep getting longer. The mortality basis constructed for Working Paper MWP-2026-04 — built layer by layer from the CSO's Irish Life Tables, Irish insured-lives experience and a modern improvement projection — puts a healthy 65-year-old's expected further lifetime at just over 24 years, and gives more than eight in ten healthy 65-year-olds a passage to their 80th birthday. The paper's parallel calibrations also suggest Irish life expectancy at retirement ages is running roughly a year ahead of England and Wales, and improving faster. Living long is no longer the outside chance; it is the base case.

Falling mortality is a tailwind under the price of cover

Life expectancy rises because death rates fall, and falling death rates quietly favour every buyer of life cover: the pool's job gets a little easier each year. It is one of the reasons a healthy applicant can secure six-figure protection from roughly €10 a month — and why cover for younger lives in particular has rarely been better value.

Match the cover to the longer life

The job of protection has not changed — cover the years your family is financially exposed — but those years now sit later in life than they did a generation ago. Thirty-five-year mortgages, later first-time buying and children arriving later mean financial exposure routinely runs well into the 60s, so a term that felt generous when the policy was taken out may now end years before the mortgage or the last college bill does.

Income protection deserves the same look. Policies pay to a chosen ceasing age, and a plan ceasing at 60 leaves the best-earning years of a longer working life uncovered. And because Irish term assurance carries no exit fees, extending, reshaping or re-pricing cover at any life event is straightforward — the review costs nothing and routinely pays for itself.

Planning for the long life you'll probably get

Working Paper MWP-2026-04 studied the far end of the good-news story: what financial security looks like at very advanced ages. One finding deserves the widest audience. When we modelled income at age 100, a pooled, secured design delivered €51,059 a year at the point where the best do-it-yourself alternative had fallen to €19,060 — because pooling carries the long-life years the way it carries every other insurable risk.

No Irish product currently offers that cover directly, and the paper examines exactly why — the obstacle is capital regulation, not demand and not the design, which the analysis found sound and genuinely valuable. But the arithmetic holds a lesson for every household long before age 100 is in view: plans built on the assumption of a long life beat plans that merely hope for one.

The bottom line

A long life is the point of all this planning, and the numbers say you are likely to get one. Set your cover terms, ceasing ages and review dates for the long case — and enjoy the fact that the biggest trend in the data is running in your favour.