How to read an IUL illustration ledger
Updated 2026-11-10. For licensed agents; not legal or tax advice.
The ledger is the year-by-year table in the middle of an illustration. Carriers label the columns differently, but almost every IUL ledger contains the same seven pieces of information.
The columns
- Policy year and attained age. Year 1 is the first policy year. Attained age is the insured's age in that year.
- Premium outlay. What the client pays that year. A zero means premiums have stopped in the design, not that the policy has ended.
- Withdrawals and loans. Money taken out that year. Some ledgers also show the cumulative loan balance including interest.
- Accumulation (account) value. Premiums plus interest credits, minus charges, before any surrender charge.
- Cash surrender value. The account value minus any surrender charge and outstanding loans: what the client would receive on surrender.
- Death benefit. What the beneficiaries would receive, net of any loan.
- Guaranteed and non-guaranteed versions. Many carriers print the guaranteed and non-guaranteed ledgers on separate pages; some put them in adjacent columns.
Three things to check on every ledger
- Add up the premium column and compare it with the total planned premium on the summary page.
- Find the first year where the cash surrender value is greater than the total premiums paid to date. That is the break-even year under that column's assumptions.
- Look for the year the guaranteed column shows zero or "lapse".
Illustration Compare reads these columns from each carrier's PDF, records the page each figure came from, and checks that the premium column adds up to the total on the summary page. Figures it isn't sure about are flagged for you to check against the original.