How Much Is £100,000 Of Life Insurance?

There is nothing wrong with £100,000 of cover. There is something wrong with choosing it because it is a round number, and that is overwhelmingly how it gets chosen.

The number that matters is specific to you and has three parts. What has to be repaid: the mortgage balance, and any other debt that would not die with you. What has to be replaced: your income, multiplied by the years your family would need it, which is usually until the youngest child is independent. And what has to be paid for: a funeral, and any one-off costs such as childcare that your absence would create.

Add those and subtract what already exists, including death in service and any older policy still running. The answer is almost never a round hundred thousand. For a family with a mortgage and young children it is frequently several times that, and for someone later in life with the mortgage repaid it is frequently much less.

This is the whole reason the number is worth five minutes with a calculator. Both errors cost real money: too little cover is the one that hurts a family, and too much is paying every month for something nobody will need.

Before settling on this amount it is worth knowing what more would cost, because people routinely assume the relationship is proportional and at younger ages it is not. In our examples a 30 year old non-smoker paid £4.67 a month for £100,000 of level cover over 25 years and £6.45 for £200,000.

At 40 the same comparison was £7.68 against £13.87, and at 50 it was £17.29 against £31.89. So doubling the cover costs noticeably less than double at 30, and close to double by 50.

The practical consequence is that if your calculation lands somewhere above £100,000, the extra cover is likely to cost less than you expect, particularly if you are under 40. These are quotes for a standard healthy profile, one life, guaranteed premiums, taken between 26 August 2026 and 1 September 2026.

The half of the calculation people skip is the subtraction, and skipping it is how you end up insured twice for the same risk.

Death in service through an employer is the big one, commonly a multiple of salary. It is worth knowing the figure, and worth knowing that it belongs to the job rather than to you: it ends when you leave, which is exactly when people are least likely to think about it.

Then there are old policies. Cover taken out with a previous mortgage often keeps running after that mortgage is gone, sometimes for decades, occasionally forgotten entirely. Some pensions carry a lump sum death benefit. Mortgage payment protection may still be in place.

None of this means buying nothing. It means buying the gap. An inventory of what you hold, what it pays and when each piece ends is frequently more useful than any quote.

There is one case where the sum is almost always underestimated, and it is the household where one person is not bringing in a wage.

A stay-at-home parent's economic contribution is invisible on a payslip and very visible the moment it stops. Childcare at full-time rates, after-school care, holiday cover and the household work somebody else would have to be paid to do add up to a substantial annual figure, and it continues for years.

Because there is no salary to multiply, people often insure that person for a token amount or not at all. Running the actual numbers, what replacing that care would cost per year until the youngest child is independent, usually produces a figure well above £100,000 and is a genuinely useful exercise.