Twin studies are one of the most widely used methods for quantifying the influence of genetic and environmental factors on some traits such as a life span or a disease. In this paper we propose a genetic mixed linear model for twin survival time data, which allows us to separate the genetic component from the environmental component. Inferences are based upon the hierarchical likelihood (h-likelihood), which provides a statistically efficient and simple unified framework for various random-effect models. We also propose a simple and fast computation method for analyzing a large data set on twin survival study. The new method is illustrated to the survival data in Swedish Twin Registry. A simulation study is carried out to evaluate the performance.