Life tables

Life tables (also known as mortality tables) provide a comprehensive measure of the effect of mortality on life expectancy. They contain data showing the mortality experience of a hypothetical population born at the same time and subject throughout their lifetime to the age-specific mortality rates of a particular time period, usually a given year.

Life tables for national populations are officially published by national statistical offices such as the National Center for Health Statistics (US).

Large collections of life tables are available from the Human Mortality Database (HMD) and The Human Life-Table Database (HLD).
In most cases, separate tables are available for female, male and total population.
Sometimes, as it's the case with the tables published by the US National Center for Health Statistics, additional tables are available based upon race.

Please note that these are life tables which cover general populations: calculations based upon them can only be used to get an approximate figure.

This is the reason why insurance companies create their own life tables, based on the mortality statistics of their policyholders.

A common distinction they make is between smokers and non-smokers, but they also have tables for specific policyholders: life annuity policyholders usually have a higher chance of survival compared to the general population, since the purchase of a life annuity is normally not considered when one is in bad health.

Life Tables Window

To open the Life Tables window and to examine the tables that are provided with FinKit, select Life Tables from the File menu.

To see what data each column represents, let the cursor hover briefly over the columns header.

Life table factors

Function	Description
age x	exact age of person in years
lx	number of persons alive at exact age x note: the value for age 0 is called the radix
dx	number of persons dying between age x and age x + 1
qx	probability of dying between age x and age x + 1
Lx	number of person-years lived between ages x and x + 1
Tx	total number of person-years lived at and after age x
ex	life expectancy at exact age x

Note

FinKit recalculates the lx and dx factors in order to achieve greater accuracy and to enable calculations up to ages for which the life table values for lx and qx would become zero due to rounding.

Related topics

Temporary ilife annuity