Annuity sales over £100,000 rose 22 per cent in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year, even as the number of lower-value pots fell.

So reports the FT

The number of over-eighties buying annuities hit a decade-long high in the first half of 2026, as higher rates and incoming inheritance tax rule changes reshape how consumers approach retirement income.

Of course, buying an annuity with a pension pot has been going on for 60 years and those who are 80 today would have grown up where the market for conversion of savings to an insured income for life was more than “normal” but mandated, unless you could swap your pot for occupational pension.

We spend a lot of time worrying about generation X and very little time considering what the “boomers” are up to. If you are 80 today, you would have been in your sixties when pension freedoms came along in 2014. You might have escaped annuitisation in the years before that if you could prove you had independent means. Smart people avoided buying an annuity when gilt yields were nailed to the floor by quantitative easing.

But now is very different

“A healthy 65-year-old now can get a rate . . . very close to 8 per cent. We’ve seen a rate in recent testing of 8.01 per cent. That’s £8,015 a year from a £100,000 pot,” said Pete Cowell, head of annuities at Standard Life.

Some 68 per cent of new annuitants went elsewhere in the first half of this year, up from 65 per cent in the same period last year, data from the ABI shows.

Joint-life annuities continue to attract buyers after rates earlier this year climbed to their highest level since 2008. The number of joint-life annuities rose 8 per cent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, while the number of single-life policies increased by 4 per cent over the same period, ABI data shows.

This is undoubtedly good news for a generation starved of income for two decades. Bond rates are at their highest since 2004 and every rise in rates (sorry as it is for Government) is good news for the older generations.

People appear to be picking up that a joint life annuity is an act of love, especially to unmarried couples who would otherwise leave an IHT bill one to another in the case of early death. An annuity does not leave a bill but a lifetime income as a gift. Incidentally, we are building a joint life pension into our CDC proposal that you need to opt out-of rather than into.

Perhaps it should be touted a little more, that the changes in taxation of pension pots in 2027, part of a wider push for income creation rather than wealth management, is returning older people to a world that they spent their working lives saving for.