Written by · Reviewed by Smiths Insurance & KiwiSaver — licensed Financial Advice Provider (FSP712931) · Last updated 2026-08-15

What Drives Life Insurance Premiums in New Zealand

A New Zealand life insurance premium is built in two stages. First the insurer picks a base rate from a table indexed by your age, gender and smoker status. Then it adjusts that rate for your occupation class, your build, your medical and family history, how much cover you buy, and the premium structure you choose. Age and smoker status set the starting point and move it more than anything else. Everything after that is an adjustment to a number that has already been largely decided.

Understanding which lever does what matters, because the levers behave very differently. Some you cannot change. Some you can change and have the policy re-rated. And one of them , premium structure , is a choice you make on day one that shapes what you pay for the next thirty years.

Age is the engine, and it compounds

Life cover pays out on death, so the underlying cost of one year of cover tracks the probability that you die in that year. That probability is not a matter of opinion. Stats NZ publishes it.

Age band Men (annual deaths per 1,000) Women (annual deaths per 1,000) Source
30–34 0.9 0.4 Stats NZ abridged period life table 2021–2023
40–44 1.5 1.0 Stats NZ abridged period life table 2021–2023
50–54 3.5 2.4 Stats NZ abridged period life table 2021–2023
60–64 8.1 5.6 Stats NZ abridged period life table 2021–2023
70–74 19.7 13.3 Stats NZ abridged period life table 2021–2023

Read down that table and the compounding is obvious. For men the annual death rate at 40–44 is about 1.7 times the rate at 30–34, and it then roughly doubles every decade after that, so by 70–74 it is more than twenty times the rate at 30–34. That is the shape of the curve your risk premium is riding.

Two consequences follow. Buying earlier locks a lower entry point on the curve. And delaying a decision by a few years in your forties costs proportionally more than delaying by a few years in your twenties, because you are moving along a steeper part of the same curve.

Gender is priced alongside age. New Zealand insurers rate on gender: nib states that it rates applications on gender assigned at birth and will re-rate if the wrong gender was recorded (nib Ultimate Life & Living underwriting guide, release 30 June 2025).

Smoker status, and the definition is wider than cigarettes

Smoker status is not a loading applied to one rate table. Insurers run two separate tables, so a smoker is priced off a different curve entirely. What counts as "smoker" is broader than most applicants expect:

This matters more than it used to. Daily smoking in New Zealand fell to 6.9% of adults in 2023/24, down from 16.4% in 2011/12, but daily vaping is now more common than daily smoking in every age group from 15 to 44 (Ministry of Health, New Zealand Health Survey 2023/24). A large number of people who have never touched a cigarette are still rated as smokers.

The lever is reversible. After 12 continuous months free of tobacco, vaping and nicotine replacement, you can sign a non-smoker declaration and ask to be re-rated , Asteron Life, AIA, nib and others all publish that form (Asteron Life smoking update declaration). It does not happen automatically. You have to ask.

Occupation class

Insurers map every job to a class. Fidelity Life's five classes are typical:

For life cover specifically, occupation moves the price less than it does for income protection or TPD, because a desk job and a trade differ far more in disability risk than in mortality risk. nib's published occupation list makes the mechanism visible: most entries carry a "0" against the Life and Trauma columns, meaning no occupation premium increase applies, while genuinely hazardous occupations attract an additional premium expressed per thousand dollars of cover (nib occupation list, February 2025). Occupation also gates eligibility and expiry ages on disability covers, which is often the bigger practical effect.

Build, and the health measures around it

BMI is a screening trigger rather than a price in itself. Fidelity Life requires no mandatory medical evidence for a BMI above 19 and up to 36.9; at 19 or below it may ask for a medical exam or doctor's notes and apply terms; at 37 or above it moves the application into its Code A testing band (Fidelity Life underwriting guide, October 2025). Chubb Life is explicit that BMI is only a starting point for assessing metabolic risk, read alongside blood pressure and blood sugar (Chubb Life, BMI and metabolic risk).

Build also gates discounts, and those are quotable in relative terms. Partners Life offers a permanent 10% discount off eligible life and trauma premiums for applicants aged 16 or over who are non-smokers with a BMI between 18.50 and 26.99 and who complete full medical underwriting (Partners Life, Life Advantage discount). Chubb Life ran an equivalent 15% "Lifetime Reward" on the same two criteria , non-smoker for 12 months and BMI between 18.5 and 26.99 , for applications between 31 July 2025 and 30 June 2026 (Chubb Life Lifetime Reward terms and conditions, effective 1 April 2026). Two people identical on every other factor can sit a full discount band apart on build alone.

Medical and family history

This is where the spread gets widest, and it is applied as an explicit adjustment rather than buried in a rate table. Partners Life describes percentage loadings , the most common form , as ranging from 50% to 400% on top of the standard rate for your age, gender, smoking status and occupation, used for conditions that cannot be excluded because they affect overall health, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or a strong family history of certain cancers (Partners Life, what are premium loadings). The alternative is a per-mille loading, charged per thousand dollars of cover.

For a concrete case, Chubb Life states that for customers with Type 1 diabetes it is most common to be able to offer life cover only, with a loading of at least 100% (Chubb Life, diving into diabetes). Family history works the same way but is usually about first-degree relatives and the age at which they were diagnosed, not simply whether a condition exists somewhere in the family.

The four possible outcomes are standard terms, a loading, an exclusion, or a deferral. An exclusion carves out a specific cause and leaves the price alone; a loading keeps the cover whole and raises the price. Which one you are offered is negotiable, and it is worth pre-assessing before a formal application , most insurers offer that.

Cover amount is not a straight line

Doubling your sum insured does not double your premium, for three reasons.

A flat policy fee sits on top of the risk premium, so it makes up a larger share of a small policy than a large one. Large sums insured attract volume discounts: Partners Life increased its large sum discount for sums insured of $500,000 or more across life, life income, terminal illness and accidental death cover in June 2023, on the basis that bigger policies showed better claims experience (RiskinfoNZ, June 2023). And bundling thresholds are set in sum-insured terms: Chubb Life's multi-benefit discount requires at least $200,000 of life cover plus a qualifying second cover to earn 10%, or two additional covers to earn 12.5%, applied to risk premiums only and never to the policy fee (Chubb Life multi-benefit discount terms, effective 4 December 2024).

Cover amount also changes how hard you are underwritten, and that interacts with age. Fidelity Life accepts life cover up to $500,000 on the application form alone at any age, but from age 61 anything above $500,000 triggers medical evidence, and above $3,000,000 the evidence requirements escalate at every age (Fidelity Life non-medical limits, October 2025).

Premium structure is the choice you make once

Stepped premiums re-price against your current age every year, so they follow the mortality curve in the table above , cheap early, steep later. Level premiums average the expected cost across a fixed term and hold the rate flat over it. You are not avoiding the curve; you are pre-paying part of it.

The entry rules give the mechanism away. Chubb Life's Assurance Extra allows life cover entry up to age 70, but only to age 55 for the "level to age 65" option and age 60 for "level to age 70" (Chubb Life Assurance Extra Life Cover brochure, current as at April 2025). Level pricing needs enough years of overpayment early to fund the underpayment later, so the insurer will not sell it to someone who has already climbed the steep part of the curve. Our full breakdown of the trade-off, including where the crossover sits, is in stepped vs level premiums. Note that a level premium is level on a fixed sum insured , if you keep CPI indexation switched on, your cover grows and the premium grows with it.

What to do with this

Ranked by how much they move the number: age and gender set the base, smoker status shifts you to a different table entirely, medical and family history can add anywhere from a 50% loading upwards, build and occupation adjust at the margins and gate discounts, and cover amount and structure decide the shape of what you pay over time.

Because every insurer keeps its own rate tables, occupation mappings, BMI thresholds and discount rules, the same person can be scored quite differently across the market , and the gaps are widest exactly where the adjustments bite, on health history and build. That is the case for comparing rather than accepting the first offer. How we run those comparisons is set out in our methodology.

If you want to see how these factors land on your own situation across the New Zealand market, start a comparison and one of our advisers will walk you through the options and what the underwriting is likely to look like.

Sources

This article is general information only and is not personalised financial advice. It does not take your objectives, financial situation or needs into account. Craig Smith Business Services Limited is a licensed Financial Advice Provider, FSP712931.

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