In terms of annualized new premiums, individual life insurance sales increased by 15% in the third quarter of 2025, reveals LIMRA’s report, Canadian Individual Life Insurance Sales.
According to LIMRA’s quarterly sales survey, the source of this report, new premiums reached $562 million in the third quarter of 2025, compared to $478 million in the third quarter of 2024. The third-quarter 2025 results show that growth has accelerated since the beginning of the year.
In the second quarter of 2025, sales in terms of premiums increased by 9% compared to the second quarter of 2024. In the first quarter of 2025, they climbed by 13% compared to the same quarter of 2024.
Since the beginning of 2025, individual life insurance sales annualized premium reached $1.6 billion, compared to $1.4 billion during the same period in 2024. This represents a 14.3% increase in 2025. New life insurance premium in the third quarter of 2025 mark the fifth consecutive quarter of growth in annualized premium in Canada.
Policy numbers on the rise
"Total policy growth has improved 9% year over year." - Catherine Theroux
The number of policies sold during the first three quarters of 2025 rebounded. “According to our sales study, total policy growth has improved 9% year over year,” Catherine Theroux, spokesperson for LIMRA, told the Insurance Portal.
LIMRA’s report for the third quarter of 2025 reveals that the Canadian industry sold 513,921 policies from January 1 to September 30 of the current year. It will need to sell more than 100,00 policies in the fourth quarter of 2025 to match 2024 when 635,067 policies were sold.
The number of policies sold in 2024 had decreased by 5% compared to 2023, as reported by the Insurance Portal on June 12, 2025. It should be underlined that this present article deals with a dataset prepared exclusively by LIMRA for the Insurance Portal. For this exclusive dataset, the organization combined the results collected from companies that participate in its surveys with those from companies that do not.
As for LIMRA's survey for the third quarter of 2025, the following insurers participated: Assumption Life, Beneva, BMO Insurance, Canada Life, Knights of Columbus, Co-operators Life, Blue Cross Life, Desjardins Financial Security, Empire Life, Equitable, Foresters Financial, iA Financial Group, ivari, Manulife, RBC Insurance, Securian Canada, Sun Life, and Wawanesa Life.
Among other things, the absence of Combined Insurance (a subsidiary of Chubb), Humania Assurance, Primerica Life, Serenia Life, and UV Insurance is noteworthy.
Whole life insurance: a premium magnet
Whole life insurance continues to attract the majority of new annualized premiums written in the Canadian market. In the first three quarters of 2025, this product accounted for more than two-thirds of total individual life insurance premiums written in Canada.
In terms of the number of policies sold, term life insurance is proving to be the most popular. In this respect, it significantly outpaced whole life and universal life insurance in the period from January 1 to September 30, 2025.
Often outpaced by whole life insurance in premium growth, universal life insurance experienced a strong third quarter of 2025. It surpassed whole life insurance by two percentage points compared to the third quarter of 2024.
At the end of the first three quarters of 2025, its growth, compared to the same period in 2024, puts universal life almost neck and neck with that of whole life.
Among the various distribution channels explored in the LIMRA survey, career agencies and securities firms (national accounts) vied for the strongest premium growth in the third quarter of 2025, compared to the same period in 2024. They also dominated premium growth between January 1 and September 30, 2025, compared to 2024.
