A nine-times gap sounds like marketing. Here is what it actually measures.

The first mistake: reading it as a forecast

Someone with a $150,000 policy reads $212,066 and hears a number close to what they might get. That is not what the figure says. It is the mean payout across every transaction LISA's members closed last year, on policies ranging from modest to enormous. A large policy sold well pulls that average up for everyone.

The two figures also do not describe the same policies. The $24,360 is the average surrender value of the policies that sold. It is not what a randomly chosen policy would surrender for.

The second mistake: dismissing it as marketing

The opposite error is just as costly. Because the number is used in advertising, people assume it is inflated, and conclude the whole market is a sales pitch. Then they surrender a policy that had buyers.

Two things argue against that reading. The first is that the figure comes from an industry association reporting its members' completed transactions, not from a company advertising its own results. The second is that independent academic work found the same direction of travel years ago: a London Business School study of more than 9,000 policies, with over $24 billion in aggregate death benefit, found that owners who sold collectively received more than four times what surrendering would have paid.

Different dataset, different decade, different methodology, same conclusion. The gap is a real feature of how these two things are priced, not an artefact of one good year.

The part of the 2025 data nobody quotes

The headline is the nine-times multiple. The more interesting line is underneath it: average cash surrender offers fell 27% in 2025, from $33,493 to $24,360.

Most of the widening gap came from insurers paying less, not from buyers paying more. That matters if you are deciding what to do with a policy, because it means the surrender figure your carrier quotes you today is likely worse than the one they would have quoted two years ago. The alternative did not improve. The default got worse.

What the number is actually useful for

One thing: deciding whether to spend a phone call finding out. It tells you there is a market, that the market pays materially more than surrendering when a policy qualifies, and that the difference is large enough to be worth twenty minutes.

It tells you nothing about your policy. That answer comes from buyers looking at your specific file after a life expectancy assessment, and most policies that people hope to sell turn out to have no market at all. What actually determines the number is a more useful read than any average.