Living longer, yet dying younger: what our claims data reveals about life in the UAE

At this year's Zurich Business Update event, we brought together around 300 of our partners and asked one simple question: in a single word, what do you value most? The answers came back almost in unison. Family. Health. The people we love. It’s a fitting place to start, because that’s exactly what this year’s The Value of Life report is about.
This year marks the 14th edition of our Customer Claims Report, and Zurich is still the only insurer in the region to publish life-only claims data year after year. We do it for one reason: to show people the real risks we see in the UAE, so they can act early, plan ahead, and be ready for whatever life brings. The report looks at three areas: life, physical health, and, for the first time, mental health  .

Living longer, yet dying younger

There’s an uncomfortable truth in this year’s data. As Shilpa Chitanand, our Head of Retail Distribution, put it: “We’re living longer, but we’re also dying earlier.”
The numbers bear it out. Since 2020, the oldest age for a death claim has risen by a decade to 90. At the same time, the youngest has fallen to 25. The average age for a life cover claim is now 52, two years younger than before.
As Shilpa noted, “these are not retirement years. These are peak responsibility years.” They’re the years when people are building careers, raising children, and supporting parents all at once.

More of us are living through serious illness

For the first time, most of what we pay out isn’t for loss of life. Three out of every five claims are now for critical illness, where people survive but face serious, life-altering health challenges. Cancer accounts for more than half of those claims, followed closely by heart attack and stroke.
And it arrives earlier than many expect. The average critical illness claim comes at age 50, the youngest adult claim at just 19, and we even see children’s claims averaging around age eight. That’s why protection has to do more than cover a worst-case ending. “Critical illness protection isn’t about replacing a life,” Shilpa said. “It’s about protecting life while living it.”

Women face a sharper, and often hidden, risk

Some of the clearest signals in this year’s report are about women. Deaths caused by heart attacks and strokes among women are now four times higher than in 2020, conditions that have long gone under-recognised and are too often diagnosed late. Breast cancer remains the leading cause of both living-benefit and death claims for women, making up half of their critical illness claims.
Yet women remain underprepared. On average, life cover for men is 88% higher than for women, and three in five insured women hold cover below 200,000 dollars. The risk is rising while the protection is lagging behind.
Anjali Srivastava, one of our customers, understand what that gap can cost. After losing her husband suddenly in early 2025, she told us how planning ahead gave her family room to grieve rather than worry. Today she supports a community of women going through the same loss and her message to them is consistent: don’t leave your own protection to chance. 

Mental health, the next frontier

This is the first year we’ve brought mental health into the report. Alongside our claims data, this section draws on local findings from Zurich Insurance Group’s Value of Mental Health report (2026 UAE dataset) The picture is sobering. By 2030, one in seven people in the UAE could be living with a mental health condition, and those living with one today lose around 66 healthy days a year. Anxiety and depression already account for close to 60% of recorded cases, and younger generations are the most affected.
“Let us break the silence and start the conversation,” said Dr Khatchik Kinoyan, our Chief Underwriter. The encouraging part is that the UAE isn’t standing still. Mental health now sits within the national agenda, families provide more than a thousand hours of informal care each year, and a growing number of employers are building wellbeing into the workplace.

The value of a plan

Behind every figure in this report is a person. This year, we heard some of those stories first-hand. Harish Panchal spoke with rare openness about love and loss, and the quiet strength it took to keep mobbing forward after losing the person he called his best friend. What stayed with the room was his reflection on preparation: that we can’t control when life changes, only how ready we are to care for the people who depend on us. Watch Harish Panchal share his story in his own words. 
Their stories say what the data can’t. As Walter Jopp, our Middle East CEO, told us: “Life insurance is not a product. It’s a promise made in the present to protect a future we cannot see.” And keeping that promise, he reminded us, is why excellence in our work is never optional. 
We take that promise seriously. Over the past three years, we’ve paid more than 255 million dollars in claims in the UAE. We pay 97% of life claims, usually within 72 hours of receiving everything we need, and we’ve paid claims in 73 countries. It’s part of why people in the UAE rate us 4.6 stars, the highest of any life insurer here.

Acting early is an act of love

The takeaway is simple, and it’s the one our customers kept returning to. Acting early isn’t only practical planning. It’s an expression of love and responsibility, for ourselves and the people who rely on us. Or, as Shilpa put it in closing: “a life worth living is a life worth insuring.”

Read the full Value of Life report and start a conversation with a financial adviser at zurich.ae.
You can also read the coverage in Khaleej Times: Heart attacks, strokes account for 41% of UAE death claims, Zurich report finds | Khaleej Times