A set of age-specific rates of assumed mortality (or survival), intended to represent the mortality currently happening in a given population without any allowance for future variation. For pension scheme valuations, off-the-shelf mortality tables may be crudely tailored by reference to actual experience in large pension schemes, but this requires large volumes of data to see through the statistical ‘noise’. The rates in an off-the-shelf base table may be adjusted by applying an age rating or a scaling factor.