Illustration ledger is the detailed tabular output of a life insurance or annuity illustration showing year-by-year values such as premiums, cash values, death benefits, surrender charges, and loans under specified assumptions. It translates complex product mechanics into a numeric roadmap that clients and advisors can analyze. While helpful for planning, illustration ledgers rely on non-guaranteed elements like credited rates and cost-of-insurance charges, which may differ from future actual experience.

Advisors use illustration ledgers to explain how policies are expected to behave over time, testing different funding levels, loan scenarios, and index-credit assumptions. They highlight guaranteed versus non-guaranteed columns and stress the importance of periodic reviews. Compliance departments require signed illustration acknowledgments in many cases, confirming that clients have seen and understood ledger projections. Understanding illustration ledgers helps advisors avoid presenting them as promises and instead use them as planning tools subject to ongoing monitoring.