Life Insurance Statistics in Canada (2026): Coverage

The most expensive thing about life insurance in Canada is what people believe it costs. Under-30s overestimate the price of a $250,000 term policy by 10 to 12 times (LIMRA) — and 53% name cost as the reason they have no coverage. The result is 8.4 million Canadians who say they need more protection than they have, in a country already holding $6 trillion in force. This is not an affordability problem; it is an information problem, and the data below shows exactly where the misperception sits. Sourced to LIMRA and CLHIA, with our calculations labelled (InsuranceXpert analysis).

What share of Canadians have life insurance?

About 57% of Canadian adults own life insurance — individual or through work — but nearly a third say that’s not enough. The ownership figure comes from LIMRA’s Canadian Insurance Barometer (2023, the latest published wave), and it counts anyone with either an individual policy or workplace group coverage.

Zoom out to the whole industry and the numbers are large: the CLHIA reports that 23 million Canadians held roughly $6 trillion of life insurance in force in 2024, up from about $5.5 trillion and 22 million people in earlier editions. Average protection works out to about $509,000 per insured household — highest in Alberta ($606,000) and lowest in Nova Scotia ($369,000).

Those three numbers — 57%, 23 million, $6 trillion — get quoted interchangeably as “how much life insurance Canada has,” but they measure different things (share of adults, number of people, total face amount). Keeping them straight matters, and we return to it in the methodology.

How big is Canada’s life insurance coverage gap?

About 31% of Canadians — roughly 8.4 million adults — say they need life insurance or need more than they already have (LIMRA, 2024). The gap isn’t spread evenly:

• Gen Z: 44% report a gap — more than double the rate of Baby Boomers.
• Women: 32% versus men: 28%.
• The gap is most pronounced in households earning under $50,000 a year.

The consequences are concrete. Four in ten Canadians say their family would face financial hardship within six months of losing the primary earner, and only one in five adults describe themselves as “very knowledgeable” about life insurance.

Source: LIMRA Canadian Insurance Barometer, 2024

Why don’t more Canadians buy life insurance?

The number-one reason is cost — and it’s largely a misperception. In LIMRA’s survey, 53% of Canadians who hadn’t bought the coverage they knew they needed said it “costs too much,” and 33% cited other financial priorities. But the perception is badly miscalibrated:

• Adults under 30 overestimate the cost of a $250,000, 20-year term policy by 10 to 12 times (LIMRA, 2025).
• Overall, more than a third of Canadians overestimate life insurance costs by roughly 3×.
• 48% of Millennials and 39% of Gen Z name perceived cost as a top reason for not owning more coverage.

In other words, the biggest barrier to closing the gap isn’t affordability — it’s a belief about affordability that the actual prices don’t support.

How much does life insurance cost in Canada?

A healthy 35-year-old non-smoker can buy $500,000 of 20-year term life for roughly $22–$30 a month. Term pricing is driven mostly by age, health, smoking status, coverage amount and term length. A snapshot of current term rates:

Profile ($500K, 20-year term, non-smoker)	Monthly premium
30-year-old male	~$22
30-year-old female	~$15
40-year-old male	~$27
40-year-old female	~$19

Source: PolicyAdvisor, 2026. A 35-year-old sits between these rows; a separate PolicyMe quote put a 35-year-old male nearer $30/month — quotes vary by insurer and health class.

The contrast with permanent insurance is stark: about $73 a month buys just $100,000 of participating whole life for a 30-year-old male — versus roughly $22 a month for five times the coverage ($500,000) in term (PolicyAdvisor). That’s the core trade-off: term buys a large amount of temporary protection cheaply; whole life buys lifelong, cash-value coverage at many times the price.

Term vs whole life: what do Canadians actually buy?

Term dominates by policy count, whole life dominates by premium dollars. The two views tell different stories, which is why the “which is more popular” question has no single answer.

Product	Share of new policies sold (2025)	Share of in-force policies
Term (individual)	51.6%	~40%
Whole / permanent	32.2%	~13%
Universal life	16.2%	~13%
Group term	—	~34%

Sources: LIMRA (new sales, 2025); CLHIA (in-force mix). Group term is a large share of in-force policies because most working Canadians hold workplace coverage.

By premium, the picture flips. In 2025, whole life drove $1.6 billion of new annualized premium (+10%), with participating whole life alone responsible for 87% of the growth — versus $398 million for term and $283 million for universal life. So while term is the majority of policies sold, whole life is where the premium dollars concentrate (InsuranceXpert analysis).

New sales overall hit records two years running: individual life new annualized premium rose 8% in 2024 and another 9% in 2025 to $2.3 billion, with policy counts up 4% (LIMRA).

How much do Canadian life insurers pay out?

Life and health insurers paid a record $143.3 billion in total benefits in 2024, up 12% from $128 billion in 2023. But most of that isn’t life insurance — it’s health and retirement. The breakdown:

Benefit type (2024)	Amount paid
Retirement / annuity	$71.4 billion
Health (drugs, dental, paramedical)	$53.3 billion
Life insurance	$18.6 billion
— of which death benefits	$8.9 billion
— of which living benefits / surrenders / dividends	$9.7 billion
Disability	$10 billion

Source: CLHIA, 2024. Life insurance is $18.6B of the $143.3B total — a distinction that trips up a lot of reporting (see methodology).

On the premium side, the industry collected about $168 billion in premiums and annuity contributions in 2024, of which life insurance premiums were $29.6 billion. The sector holds roughly $1.2 trillion in assets in Canada and employs more than 180,000 people.

Who are the biggest life insurers in Canada?

Three companies control two-thirds of the market. By 2024 insurance revenue, Manulife (27.1%), Sun Life (24.2%) and Canada Life (22.9%) together held 66.9%; adding iA Financial and Beneva takes the top five to about 77.5%.

Insurer	Market share (2024)
Manulife	27.1%
Sun Life	24.2%
Canada Life	22.9%
iA Financial	6.1%
All others (incl. Beneva, RBC, BMO, Desjardins, Co-operators)	~19.7%

Source: Insurance Portal, based on 2024 IFRS-17 insurance revenue (life & health combined). Combined revenue of ranked companies was $104.9 billion, up 7.8% year over year.

Several insurers we rate for car and home — Desjardins, RBC and The Co-operators — also sell life insurance, which is why bundling can be worth a quote even though the life market is led by the big three life carriers.

Source: Insurance Portal (2024 IFRS-17 insurance revenue; life & health combined)

Where is the market heading?

New-sales records and a shift to digital are the two defining trends. Individual life premium set records in both 2024 and 2025, and direct-to-consumer online channels are the fastest-growing distribution method — digital sales are compounding at roughly 6% a year, while traditional agents still held about 32% of premiums in 2025. No-medical and simplified-issue policies continue to expand access for buyers who want speed or have health conditions.

The broader Canadian insurance market (life and non-life combined) is forecast to grow from about US$173 billion in 2026 to US$222 billion by 2031, a 5.07% CAGR — though that figure includes property & casualty, so it isn’t a life-only number.

The sector’s footprint reaches well beyond policies. Canada’s life and health insurers cover nearly 30 million Canadians across life, health and retirement products — including about 27 million with health coverage and 10 million with retirement savings — employ more than 180,000 people, pay roughly $12.1 billion in taxes, and hold over $1 trillion in long-term investments, including some $50 billion in domestic infrastructure. CLHIA members represent about 99% of Canada’s life and health insurance business, which is why their aggregate data is the authoritative view of the market (InsuranceXpert analysis).

Methodology: why do the sources disagree?

Life insurance statistics are unusually easy to misquote, because several very different numbers all sound like “how much life insurance Canada has.” Here’s how to read them.

People vs policies vs face amount. CLHIA’s “$6 trillion” is the total face amount of coverage in force; “23 million” is people; LIMRA’s “57%” is the share of adults who own. All three are correct and describe different things. They should never be blended into one sentence.

Individual vs group coverage. LIMRA’s 57% ownership counts anyone with an individual or an employer group policy. Group coverage inflates “ownership” while often being modest — one or two times salary — and non-portable when you leave the job. That’s exactly why 31% of Canadians still report a gap despite most “having” life insurance.

Life-only vs “life & health” combined. This is the biggest trap. CLHIA’s headline figures — $143.3B in benefits, $168B in premiums, $1.2T in assets — describe the entire life and health industry, including drug and dental plans and retirement annuities. The life-only numbers are far smaller: $18.6B in benefits and $29.6B in premiums. A lot of coverage quotes the combined figure as if it were life insurance.

Market-share basis. The Manulife / Sun Life / Canada Life shares are based on total insurance revenue — blending group benefits, health and wealth, not pure individual-life premium. A life-only leaderboard would look somewhat different.

New sales vs in-force. Product splits like “51.6% term” describe this year’s new policies; the in-force mix (~40% term) describes the accumulated book. Term looks larger in new sales because term policies lapse and get rewritten more often than permanent ones.

Ownership vintage. The 57% ownership figure is from LIMRA’s 2023 Barometer, the most recent published Canadian wave — we present it as “latest available,” not as a 2026 reading, because attitudes and ownership move slowly and a fresher national figure isn’t yet public.

Understanding these distinctions is the difference between a defensible statistic and a misleading one — which is why we source and label every figure here rather than pick one number and present it as the whole picture.