How Much Life Insurance Do I Need?
Two minutes, your own figures, and arithmetic you can check. It works out the size of the problem — not the price of the solution, which depends on things a web page cannot know about you.
Most life insurance is sold on a multiple of salary — ten times income, twelve times income. It is a tidy number, it is easy to say on the phone, and it has very little to do with your situation. Two people earning the same amount can need wildly different cover: one has a paid-off house and grown children, the other has twenty-two years left on a mortgage and a five-year-old.
A needs analysis works the other way round. It starts from the obligations that would actually land on your family if you died tomorrow, adds the income they would lose, then subtracts what you have already put in place. What is left is the gap. That is the number worth insuring, and it is usually not a round multiple of anything.
The calculator below does that arithmetic in your browser and shows every line of it. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to send it, and you do not have to give an email address to see the result.
Your figures
Leave anything blank that does not apply. Rough numbers are fine — this is about the size of the gap, not the last dollar.
Prefer to work it out yourself?
The calculator above needs JavaScript. The arithmetic is not complicated — here it is, so you can do it on paper and skip us entirely if you want to.
- Add up your mortgage balance and any other debts.
- Add what a funeral and the final bills would cost.
- Add anything you would want to leave toward education.
- Multiply the annual income your household would lose by the number of years it would need replacing, and add that.
- Subtract life insurance already in force, including through work.
- Subtract the savings your family would genuinely spend.
- What is left is the gap.
Questions about this number
Why not just use ten times my income?
Because it answers a question nobody asked. A multiple of salary ignores whether your house is paid off, how old your children are, what your spouse earns and what you have already saved — which are the four things that actually decide the answer. It survives because it is easy to say, not because it is right. Two people on identical salaries can genuinely need very different amounts.
Should I count the life insurance I get through work?
Count it, but carefully. Group coverage usually ends when the job does, it is often a fixed multiple of salary rather than an amount you chose, and it is rarely portable on terms worth taking. If you would be in trouble the month after leaving that employer, treat the group amount as temporary rather than as cover you own.
Does this tell me what a policy will cost?
No, deliberately. Premiums depend on your age, your health, the term and the company, and underwriting differs enough between insurers that one may decline what another accepts at a standard rate. Any price printed on a web page would be wrong for most of the people reading it. This works out how much cover you need; we quote the cost against your actual details.
What if the number comes out enormous?
It often does, and that is useful information rather than a reason to stop. Term life buys more death benefit per dollar than anything else precisely because it expires, so a large figure is usually cheaper to cover than people expect. And if the whole gap is out of reach, insuring part of it is a real answer — covering the mortgage alone changes what happens to your family. Partial cover beats none, and nobody should talk you out of the smaller policy you will actually keep.
Send this to a licensed agent
Your figure goes with it, so the conversation starts from your numbers instead of from scratch. A licensed agent calls back, usually the same business day, and will tell you plainly if you need less than the calculator suggests.
Read next
Term Life Insurance — what this gap usually gets covered with, and what happens when the term ends. · All life insurance · Burial Insurance if the only gap you have is the funeral.