The $9.6 Trillion Insurance Portfolio Is Going Private

The $9.58 Trillion Portfolio

The U.S. insurance industry sits on one of the largest pools of investable capital in the world. At year-end 2025, insurers held $9.58 trillion in cash and invested assets, per the NAIC—up 6.7% for the year and roughly 65% over the past decade.

At first glance the portfolio still looks traditional: nearly 60% bonds, 14% stock, 6.2% cash. But that headline allocation hides a real shift. Insurers’ private-capital exposure does not sit neatly under “private equity.” Private equity gets the headlines. But the bigger story is the migration of insurers’ capital private credit, mortgage loans, structured securities, CLOs, private placements, alternatives, joint ventures and real assets. The portfolio is traditional on the surface, and increasingly private underneath.

Traditional vs. Private/Alternative Exposure

^{*The latest NAIC CLO-specific figure is $276.8 billion at year-end 2024. CLOs are already included within the bond portfolio and should not be added on top of the 59.8%.}

The critical distinction: Schedule BA is not synonymous with private equity, bonds are not synonymous with traditional public credit, and private credit is not a single statutory category—it cuts across all of them.

Where the Private-Capital Exposure Actually Sits

Private Credit

Private credit is arguably the most important, least visible piece of the shift. Life insurers have become major providers of capital to leveraged companies through private placements, direct loans, leveraged loans, CLOs, BDCs and loan funds. The Federal Reserve has documented a significant expansion in life insurers’ exposure to risky corporate debt since the financial crisis; by the end of 2023, life insurers held roughly $212 billion of CLO exposure alone, and insurer-affiliated asset managers had become major players in the underlying loan market. Because private credit can live inside bonds, mortgages, CLOs, BDCs and alternatives simultaneously, no single percentage captures it.

CLOs: $277 Billion and Growing

CLOs offer one of the clearest windows into this migration. At year-end 2024, insurers held about $276.8 billion of CLOs—3.1% of invested assets, more than double the 2018 level. Life insurers held 82% of that exposure; the ten largest insurer groups held 43%. PE-owned insurers held about $59 billion, or 21%, despite representing a much smaller share of the industry—one of the clearest places the insurance and private-capital industries intersect.

Mortgage Loans: $868 Billion

Mortgage loans, at $868 billion (9.1% of assets), are less exotic but economically distinct from publicly traded bonds—they’re direct loans, not securities traded continuously. Life insurers hold 96% of the total. But mortgage lending has been conventional for decades, so it shouldn’t be framed as new. Not every private asset is an alternative asset.

Schedule BA: The Alternative-Investment Reservoir

Schedule BA and other long-term investments—$639 billion, 6.7% of assets—is where the picture gets murkier. It includes joint ventures, PE-related investments, collateral loans and real assets, and 2025 accounting changes may have shifted some bond holdings here. It’s best read as a window into the alternative-investment ecosystem, not a synonym for private equity.

Private Equity: Smaller Than The Headlines Suggest

Private equity itself is smaller than the headlines suggest. At year-end 2024, NAIC identified 137 PE-owned insurers holding about $704 billion in assets—still mostly bonds ($431B) and mortgages ($138B), with only $43.1 billion in Schedule BA. But 67% of that Schedule BA exposure was affiliated, versus 48% industrywide, showing that PE ownership is associated with a broader private-capital architecture, not simply more private equity.

What We Can Actually Measure

One of the dangers in this subject is false precision. The following distinction should be made explicit in any serious analysis.

This is why a single number for “private-market exposure” can be misleading. The private-capital footprint is a cross-cutting exposure, not an asset-class label.

The Insurance/Private-Equity Nexus

The clearest examples of the insurance/private-capital nexus are concentrated among large life and annuity companies:

Athene, Global Atlantic and Corebridge illustrate the convergence most clearly. Athene’s $292 billion portfolio blends corporate credit, CLOs, mortgages and alternatives, with mortgage loans alone near $95.5 billion. KKR’s 2024 acquisition of Global Atlantic created a direct bridge to a major private-markets manager; by mid-2026 Global Atlantic held about $220 billion in Assets Under Management (AUM), including $164 billion of credit. Blackstone manages roughly $71.2 billion of Corebridge’s assets, rising toward $92.5 billion by 2027. In each case the insurer supplies long-duration capital and the manager supplies sourcing and underwriting—increasingly functioning as one capital ecosystem.

Not Just a PE-Owned-Insurer Story

This is not purely a PE-owned-insurer story. Prudential’s PGIM managed about $112.6 billion in private placements, loans and mezzanine investments at year-end 2025; Voya reported roughly $86 billion in private fixed income. PE ownership may accelerate the shift into private markets, but it didn’t create it.

A Decade of Change

In 2015, insurers held $5.8 trillion in cash and invested assets, with bonds at 67%. By 2025 the pool had grown to $9.58 trillion, with bonds at 59.8%—a 65% increase in size and a roughly 7-point decline in bond share. One percentage point now equals about $96 billion, so even a modest five-point allocation shift represents roughly $480 billion. On the Federal Reserve’s broader financial-accounts measure, insurance-company financial assets grew from $6.44 trillion in 2005 to $14.86 trillion in 2025—2.3 times over, on a different but directionally consistent basis. Insurance balance sheets have become vastly larger pools of capital, and even modest allocation shifts now move hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Risk Question

The appeal is straightforward: higher yields, floating-rate income, illiquidity premiums and access to loans unavailable in public markets. But private assets are less liquid and transparent, valuations less frequent, and credit deterioration can take longer to surface. Where an insurer and its affiliated manager are closely linked, questions of conflicts, valuation and concentration follow. The NAIC’s private-credit initiative is pushing new disclosure requirements, and the Federal Reserve has flagged insurers’ growing role in expanding private credit and their rising exposure to illiquid assets.

Concluding Thoughts

The $9.6 trillion insurance portfolio has not become a giant private-equity fund—it remains primarily fixed income. But the character of that fixed income is changing. Private credit, mortgages, CLOs, structured finance and affiliated asset managers are becoming central to how insurers earn returns on their long-duration capital. The portfolio is still labeled “bonds.” Increasingly, the economics underneath look like private markets.