Demographical, economical and financial factors are likely to have a strong impact on survivor insurance. This paper resorts to a microsimulation model developped at Insee, Destinie, to evaluate the sensitivity of survivor insurance to a smaller gender gap in life expectation, to the convergence of female and male careers, and to different legislative changes in current survivor insurance rules. For instance, generalizing means-tested survivor benefits to other regimes than the private sector would be both cost-saving for the social insurer and redistributive. Moving to a pure survivor insurance scheme in which the standard of living is kept constant after the spouse’s death would also make losers and winners but would have an overall neutral impact from a redistributive viewpoint.