New technical bases for BVG 2025 confirm trends in life expectancy and disability
The new BVG 2025 technical principles provide important up-to-date data on occupational pension provision in Switzerland and show that, despite the effects of the pandemic, life expectancy continues to rise and there has been an increase in disability cases, particularly among younger insured persons.
Aon Switzerland AG and Libera AG have jointly published the new current technical bases BVG 2025. They are based on data from 14 large autonomous pension funds for the years 2020 to 2024. The data covers around 1.5 million active insured persons and 0.9 million pension recipients.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend toward rising life expectancy among people insured under occupational pension plans has been confirmed. However, at 0.3 to 0.5 years for 65-year-olds, the increase in life expectancy over the last five years has been slightly lower than in previous periods. Widows in particular had a high life expectancy of 22.6 years, which has increased significantly.
Risk of disability increases
For the first time, BVG 2025 also shows an increased average probability of disability, which represents a difference from the previous BVG 2015 and BVG 2020 bases. It is striking that the number of disability cases is increasing, particularly among insured persons under the age of 40, while the risk is decreasing among older insured persons. The probability of entitlement to a spouse's or partner's pension in the event of death remained stable for men, but increased for women. The age of the beneficiary survivors has hardly changed.
Period and generation tables
The technical basis for BVG 2025 offers both period and generation tables. The latter take into account the expected future increase in life expectancy based on updated models from the Federal Statistical Office (FSO). Pension funds that use period tables are expected to see an increase in pension capital for pensioners, while generation tables may result in a slight decrease. Another new feature is the option to adjust base figures with weighting factors to facilitate fund-specific adjustments.
Data material for pension specialists
The fundamentals are based on empirically collected data, including data from the pandemic-affected observation period of 2020 and 2021, without corrections. Due to the uncertainty regarding the pace of life expectancy growth, BVG 2025 also allows for comparison based on projections using a variant of the CMI model.
The results are now available to pension funds, insurance companies, and pension fund experts. The participating institutions have also committed to reporting their data annually for the next edition of BVG 2030.
More information: www.bvg-grundlagen.ch
