UK PRT market update
Full year 2025
The UK Pension Risk Transfer (PRT) market is on track to have delivered another strong year, continuing a four-year run of increased transaction activity. New business volumes for 2025 are expected to reach around £40 billion once all insurers have reported.
Over 350 transactions were completed across the market last year, exceeding the previous record of 299 in 2024, as schemes of all sizes continued to secure members’ benefits under the UK’s robust insurance regime. L&G completed three of the five largest transactions of 2025, including a £1.6 billion buy-in with the BP Pension Fund and a £4.6 billion buy-in for schemes sponsored by Ford Motor Company Limited, the largest UK PRT transaction of the year. Based on our pipeline, we expect total market volumes in 2026 to be between £40 billion and £50 billion.
While demand for PRT transactions remains high and insurers across the market are delivering strong pricing to pension schemes, it is increasingly the quality of insurer propositions that is shaping scheme decision‑making. This update explores how we are engaging with customers through in-person events and enhancing our proposition through innovation and partnerships.
Our latest insights
2026 market outlook
In this episode of The PRT Pod, new host Cleo Taylor Smith is joined by Dom Moret, Natalie Bentley and Dave Watt to explore the 2026 market outlook.
Introducing our CEO
Our recently appointed CEO of Institutional Retirement, Gareth Mee shares his early reflections in the role, ambitions for the business, and perspective on the market.
Endgame webinar
Rosie Twist, Lara Edmonstone West and Mat Webb preview our upcoming Endgame Insights report and share findings from our Trustee research with the Pensions Management Institute.
New business volumes
In 2025, we completed 45 transactions totalling £10.4 billion of UK PRT business.
Given the trend of schemes’ funding positions improving over recent years, schemes are increasingly reaching the point of buyout in surplus. This surplus can be used to enhance member benefits. Of our 2025 total, £0.2 billion relates to premium received through top-ups on existing policies to increase insured member benefits. This is excluded from the breakdown in the table below.
UK bulk annuity sales 2025 | <£100m | £100m-£500m | £500m+ |
|---|---|---|---|
Total size (£m) | 963 | 574 | 8,700 |
Average size of quote (£m) | 28 | 144 | 1,450 |
Number of transactions | 35 | 4 | 6 |
Member experience
In June, we welcomed almost 3,500 customers to our flagship engagement event at BBC Gardeners’ World Live. Colleagues from our Customer Service teams were on hand to listen, offer guidance and answer queries in a relaxed, enjoyable setting. Events like this help us build meaningful connections, strengthen trust and give customers a real voice in shaping our service.
In October, we hosted an event at our London office where around 100 customers joined us for lunch. Guests had access to a dedicated Pensions Helpdesk, heard from expert speaker Dr Julia Jones on wellbeing in later life, and attended sessions from our investments and customer service teams on how we protect and manage their benefits.
Customer Contact Association
We’re proud to have held the Customer Contact Association (CCA) Global Standard Accreditation every year since 2018. This internationally recognised framework assesses areas such as customer engagement, talent development, security and risk management.
In April 2025, we were delighted to win four major awards at the CCA Global Excellence Awards, including Best Customer Service Team, Best Learning & Development Programme, Trainer of the Year and Hybrid Excellence, demonstrating our commitment to service quality and colleague development. In 2026, we are shortlisted for a further four awards, including Customer Experience Brand of the Year, Excellence in ESG, Rising Star and Manager of the Year. Winners will be announced in April at the gala ceremony in Glasgow.
European Contact Centre and Customer Service Awards
In November we were highly commended at the ECCCSAs for Best Employee Experience.
We’re proud of the customer service reputation we’ve built, but we know member needs continue to evolve. That’s why we’ve launched a multi year, multi million pound programme to strengthen both our service proposition and the technology that supports it.
Over the next two years, we will significantly enhance our online capabilities to create a more intuitive, supportive experience for members and increase our future capacity. By the end of 2027, schemes that have completed their data cleanse will have access to a new online portal offering illustrative quotations, virtual chat support, educational resources and secure self service functionality. We’ve already begun rolling this out to pilot schemes and will continue expanding through 2026 and beyond.
Our continued focus on innovation
L&G Flow is our solution for smaller pension schemes, offering guaranteed pricing, a flexible post‑sale experience and dedicated support. In 2025, we completed 23 Flow transactions worth around £360m, and we have now exceeded £1bn in total Flow business.
We have continued to expand our pricing capacity and enhance Flow with periodic premium illustrations that help schemes track how pricing evolves during their journey to buyout. After providing initial data and benefits information, clients receive an illustration based on current market conditions, which can be refreshed regularly without exclusivity. This is supported by follow‑up discussions with our PRT team and includes a guaranteed transactable price once affordable.
Every pension scheme is different and at L&G we draw on expertise from across our Group to deliver tailored solutions before and after transactions.
Our premium certainty solutions provide an exact match to a scheme’s assets from the point we issue our premium until the buy‑in is signed. This full asset‑matching approach ensures affordability doesn’t change while terms are finalised, supporting transactions in a range of market conditions.
For Asset Management clients, we also offer a unique capability: we can lock exactly to the value of the scheme’s unit funds held with L&G and novate those funds from the scheme as premium payment. This market‑leading flexibility removes the need for asset restructuring or disinvestment and helps reduce transaction costs.
We also offer a suite of illiquid asset solutions and deferred premium options, ensuring schemes can access the right tools to support their journey to buy‑in or buyout.
We have been investing internally to strengthen our pricing capabilities. Our AI powered tool, PRoboT, has the potential to speed up and enhance how we assess PRT opportunities by rapidly extracting key data from RFQs and benefit specifications. This will help us respond faster and focus actuarial expertise where it adds the most value. Recent enhancements have improved accuracy, reliability and automation, supporting more efficient pricing decisions and helping us respond effectively as we scale to meet growing market demand.
Strategic partnerships
Our strategic partnerships play a key role in supporting our ambition to become a world leader in solving society’s retirement and investment needs.
In July, we announced a long‑term partnership with Blackstone to help grow our annuities and asset management business. The partnership will give us access to Blackstone’s private credit platform, enabling us to back the promises we make to pension schemes with a broader range of high‑quality investments, predominantly in the U.S.
Through this collaboration, we plan to invest up to 10% of our new annuity business and work together to develop new investment products that combine public and private credit. This will also support our ambition to reach more global wealth and wholesale markets.
In February 2026, we completed the sale of our US insurance entity to Meiji Yasuda, establishing a new strategic partnership that will support our international growth ambitions. This marks an important step in strengthening our presence outside the UK and reflects the strong relationship we are building with Meiji Yasuda. We will continue to maintain a strong presence in the US PRT market, which is the largest in the world, by working closely with Meiji Yasuda on future US business and combining our expertise to create a compelling proposition for pension schemes.
Recent transactions
£4.6 billion buy-in with Ford pension schemes
L&G Flow surpasses £1bn milestone
L&G completes c.£1.6 billion buy-in with the BP Pension Fund
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