US Insurance Investment Data: Methodology

TREMOR tracks how US insurance companies invest, from the Federal Reserve Z.1 Financial Accounts: table S.128.1.s for Life and S.128.2.s for Property-Casualty. The Fed published these as L.116 and L.115 until the March 2026 release, when it renamed and renumbered them. This page documents the data source, the asset-tree structure, and the key concepts, including the fast-growing "alternatives" allocation. For how the data is validated, see the companion insurance data validation page.

Open the interactive US Insurance Assets tool on TREMOR.

Every dollar figure on this page is a snapshot as at Q2 2026, the latest quarter in the data when this page was written. The interactive tool derives the same figures live, so it will be ahead of this page after each Z.1 release.

Data source

The Federal Reserve publishes the Z.1 Financial Accounts of the United States (formerly "Flow of Funds") every quarter - a comprehensive snapshot of every sector's assets and liabilities. Tables S.128.1.s (Life Insurance Companies) and S.128.2.s (Property-Casualty Insurance Companies) contain the investment-allocation data shown here. The Fed compiles these from NAIC statutory filings, SEC data, and other regulatory sources.

• Fed Z.1 Financial Accounts - the main release page
• Z.1 release CSV bundle - the machine-readable source for the published tables. Life is csv/S1281_s.csv (table S.128.1.s, formerly L.116) and P&C is csv/S1282_1_s.csv (S.128.2.s, formerly L.115). Values there are in millions.
• The old per-table HTML pages at /releases/z1/current/html/l116.htm and l115.htm were retired after the March 2026 release and now return 404. The CSV bundle replaced them.
• FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) - individual series are pulled from here.
• Series IDs start with BOGZ1 (Board of Governors Z.1). A handful of supplementary series start with LIC* (Life) or PCIC* (P&C).

Insurance sectors in Z.1

The Z.1 tracks exactly two insurance sectors:

• Life Insurance Companies (S.128.1.s) - 56 series. Companies writing life insurance, annuities, and health alongside life products.
• Property-Casualty Insurance Companies (S.128.2.s) - 39 series. All P&C lines: auto, homeowners, commercial, marine, fire, workers' comp, medical malpractice, etc.

There is no separate sector for health, home, or title insurance. Health insurers are classified under Life or P&C depending on primary business; all home/auto insurance falls under P&C.

Tree structure (how we mirror the Z.1)

The primary asset tree mirrors the published Z.1 table directly. For each sector, Total Financial Assets breaks into the published line items (Checkable Deposits, Debt Securities, Corporate Equities, Mutual Fund Shares, Loans, Total Miscellaneous Assets, etc.); where Z.1 publishes a further breakdown (Debt Securities into Treasuries / Agencies / Corporate & Foreign Bonds / Munis / Open Market Paper, or Loans into Mortgages and Other), we follow it. With this structure the Total Financial Assets tree closes exactly (sum of children = parent, 0.00% gap) for both sectors at the latest quarter; sub-trees not fully broken out are flagged on the validation page.

Memo lines (shown separately, not in the primary tree)

Some series are useful context but do not belong as children of any parent, so they are kept as memos: General Account / Separate Account totals (Life); Total Assets (Balance Sheet, a statutory-value subset); Reserve Credit Reinsured to Non-US Reinsurers (a liability-side memo and the cleanest aggregate proxy for offshore reinsurance volume); book-value versions of market-value lines; and Separate Account sub-lines. Keeping these as memos lets the primary tree close exactly.

What the data contains

• Frequency: quarterly; units: millions of USD, not seasonally adjusted; publication lag: ~10 weeks after quarter end
• Coverage: 106 quarters, 2000 to Q2 2026
• Values: stock positions (levels), balance-sheet amounts at quarter end - not flows
• Valuation: "FL"-prefix FRED IDs are book/historical-value flows-and-levels; "LM"-prefix is level at market value. Where both exist, one is in the tree and the other a memo.

Key concepts

Total Financial Assets vs Balance Sheet Assets

"Total Financial Assets" (the headline) is broader than "Total Assets (Balance Sheet)" because it includes items at market value and certain off-balance-sheet items; the Balance Sheet total uses statutory values. For Life insurers at Q2 2026, Total Financial Assets is $11.5T against a Balance Sheet of $6.4T - the difference dominated by Separate Account assets at market value and other valuation adjustments.

General Account vs Separate Accounts (Life only)

Life insurers split assets into General Accounts (insurer bears investment risk) and Separate Accounts (variable annuities / unit-linked, policyholder bears risk). At Q2 2026, GA assets are $7.8T and SA assets $3.7T (SA mostly mutual-fund and money-market shares managed for policyholders). GA and SA are not two parallel balance sheets - they are two compartments of the same one, and they sum to Total Financial Assets ($7.8T + $3.7T = $11.5T).

The Fed publishes three separate tables for Life insurers, and this tool currently uses the first:

• Total Life (table S.128.1.s, formerly L.116) - the asset breakdown behind the primary tree here. Every line (Debt Securities, Loans, Mortgages, Total Miscellaneous Assets and so on) combines GA-held and SA-held holdings.
• General Account (table S.128.1.1.s, formerly L.116.g) - a full GA-only asset breakdown, around 37 series including GA Debt Securities, GA Corporate and Foreign Bonds, GA Mortgages and GA Corporate Equities.
• Separate Account (table S.128.1.2.s, formerly L.116.s) - the equivalent SA-only breakdown.

What this tool currently tracks: the primary tree is built from the total-Life table only. From the GA and SA tables it carries the two compartment totals plus a partial set of SA sub-lines (SA Debt Securities at market value, SA Mortgages, SA Variable Annuity Mutual Fund Shares, SA Foreign Bonds and a few more). The GA and SA line-level breakdowns exist at the Fed but are not yet ingested here. That is a limitation of the tool, not of the data, and it is on the list to extend.

A concrete example. Take Debt Securities. The total-Life line at Q2 2026 is $4.6T, combining bonds held in the General Account and in the Separate Account. The Fed separately publishes a GA Debt Securities line, and SA Debt Securities at market value is $706B. This tool shows the $4.6T total-Life figure in the tree and the SA figure as a memo; the GA figure is published by the Fed but not yet carried here. The GA / SA toggle changes the denominator used for Share calculations; the primary tree rows stay total-Life.

"Unidentified Miscellaneous Assets" - the alternatives proxy

The most analytically interesting series. At Q2 2026 it is $1.2T, about 10.0% of Life insurer assets, up from $147B at the start of the series in 2000. It is the Fed's catch-all for assets that do not fit standard categories: private credit funds and direct-lending vehicles, BDC holdings, private equity fund interests, infrastructure debt, real-estate equity (non-mortgage), and other Schedule BA-type alternatives. It is NOT purely "private credit" - it includes PE and other alternatives - but the growth over 25 years represents a clear structural shift in insurer allocation toward alternatives.

Two alternatives are no longer hidden in that catch-all

The Z.1 release of 11 September 2026 broke Hedge Fund Shares and Private Debt Fund Shares out as their own published lines, and moved every historical quarter with them. At Q2 2026 they are $149B and $92B. The Fed took hedge funds out of Unidentified Miscellaneous Assets, which fell by about the same amount, and it took private debt funds mostly out of Corporate and Foreign Bonds. A reading of the catch-all series that spans that release date is therefore comparing two different definitions, and life insurers' private credit fund exposure is now published directly instead of being inferred.

Two things to know before charting either of them:

• Both series are zero before Q4 2012. The Fed pads them back to 1945 with explicit zeros, so the line sits flat for decades and then jumps. That is a publication convention, not a data error, and it is not a restatement of the earlier history.
• Both are General Account series, so the right denominator for a share is General Account assets ($7.8T), not the total-Life headline. On that basis, at Q2 2026 private debt funds are 1.2% of the General Account and hedge funds 1.9%. Seven of the 28 lines in the Fed's total-Life table are General Account only, because the Separate Account holds none of those things, which is why the table still adds up to the total.

P&C "US Direct Investment Abroad: Equity"

For P&C insurers, this line ($503B at Q2 2026, 11.5% of P&C assets) represents foreign-subsidiary equity holdings - a meaningful chunk of P&C balance sheets with no clean Life-side equivalent.

What this data does NOT tell you

• No company-level detail (industry aggregates only - cannot see MetLife vs Prudential)
• No credit-quality breakdown (cannot split investment-grade from high-yield within corporate bonds)
• No private-credit subcategory detail (cannot split PE from direct lending from BDCs within misc assets)
• No vintage or maturity information
• For company-level data, NAIC Data Store or SEC 10-K mining is required

Calculations

• YoY % - change vs the data point closest to 4 quarters earlier (within a 120-day window)
• QoQ % - change vs the immediately preceding quarter
• Share - series value as a percentage of the sector's Total Financial Assets
• Share of Delta - the series's absolute increase as a percentage of Total Financial Assets increase