How Much Is £150,000 Of Life Insurance?

The two products cost different amounts because they do different things, and the difference is easy to see once stated.

Level cover pays the same sum whenever you die during the term. £150,000 on day one and £150,000 in year twenty-four. Decreasing cover, sometimes sold as mortgage life insurance, reduces over the term roughly in line with a repayment mortgage balance, so it pays a lot early on and much less near the end. Because the insurer's average exposure is lower, decreasing cover costs less than the level cover priced on this page.

Match it to the debt. A repayment mortgage shrinks every month, so decreasing cover follows it and you are not paying for cover you no longer need. An interest-only mortgage does not shrink at all, so decreasing cover is the wrong instrument and level cover is the right one. That distinction trips people up, because both are called mortgages and the right policy is different for each.

And anything that is not a debt needs level cover. Replacing an income, raising children, leaving something behind: none of those get smaller as the years pass. A common sensible outcome is decreasing cover sized to the mortgage plus level cover sized to the family, which is two policies rather than a compromise between them.

In our examples £150,000 of level cover over 25 years cost a healthy non-smoker £4.46 a month at 20, £5.19 at 30, £10.98 at 40, £24.93 at 50 and £85.10 at 60.

Smoking roughly doubles it from middle age onwards: at 40 a smoker paid £23.39 against £10.98 for a non-smoker, and at 50 it was £72.18 against £24.93.

Every figure here is LEVEL cover, because that is what the price grid holds. Decreasing cover for the same starting sum would cost less, and the only way to know by how much for your circumstances is a quote. These are quotes for a standard healthy profile, one life, guaranteed premiums, taken between 26 August 2026 and 1 September 2026.

Cover bought alongside a mortgage usually gets the mortgage's term by default, and that is a decision made by paperwork rather than by you.

It is often right. If the only thing being covered is the loan, matching the two makes sense and the policy ends when the debt does. But if there are children in the picture, the mortgage end date and the date the youngest child becomes independent are two different dates, and the cover should run to whichever is later.

Remortgaging complicates it further. People remortgage repeatedly and the cover frequently does not get revisited, which leaves policies sized to a balance from two houses ago. A cover review at each remortgage takes very little time and is the cheapest way to avoid drifting out of shape.

At mortgage-sized sums the question of who gets the money becomes practical rather than theoretical.

If the mortgage is joint, the survivor needs the money quickly enough to keep paying it. A policy that pays into your estate waits for probate, and lenders do not pause for probate. A policy written in trust pays the people you name directly and without that delay, which is why trusts matter more as the sum gets larger.

For unmarried couples it matters more still, because there is no automatic inheritance between partners who are not married or in a civil partnership. Naming the right person on a trust is what makes the cover do what you intended, and it is paperwork done at outset rather than a thing to sort out later.