For Whole Life companies, a dividend rate is way bigger than just a number. It’s a point of pride, tangible evidence of the benefits of mutuality, an indication of corporate efficiency and investment savvy and, maybe more than anything else, the easiest and most public benchmark for comparison. But for exactly those same reasons, dividend rates are almost necessarily less than straightforward. Carriers have an incentive to maintain the rate itself while using other, less public means to adjust policy performance.