Protection Needs Calculator
How Much Life Insurance Do You Need?
Your coverage should reflect the life you’re protecting, not an arbitrary income multiplier. Build a personalized protection estimate based on income, debt, mortgage, education goals, existing coverage, and the people who depend on you.
An educational estimate. Not a quote, and not a financial recommendation.
An educational estimate, not a quote
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Income replacement
How many years of income would your family have replaced?
Think about the amount of time your family would need to adjust financially, maintain its lifestyle, and make important decisions without being forced into immediate financial changes.
Everything you enter stays in your browser. Nothing is transmitted, stored, or shared, and no account or email address is required to see your result.
How we calculate your estimate
Six categories go in. What you already have comes out. There is no hidden weighting and no score, and you can follow every line of the arithmetic in the results panel above.
Income replacement
Replace income for the number of years selected.
Mortgage and debt
Account for obligations that could remain after death.
Education
Include future education expenses when they are part of the family's goals.
Final expenses
Account for immediate expenses and administrative costs.
Family and care responsibilities
Consider financial responsibilities that would otherwise fall to someone else.
Existing protection
Subtract coverage and resources already available for these specific needs.
The estimate treats every category as an obligation you have chosen to include. It does not decide for you which of them belong in your plan, and it does not account for tax, policy structure, or the cost of coverage.
Why the 10x income rule isn’t enough
Search this question and you will find confident formulas. Ten times your income. Fifteen times. Some multiple of salary. They are popular because they are easy to repeat, not because they are accurate.
An income multiple can be a simple starting point, and for some households it will land in roughly the right place. The problem is that it does not account for the full financial picture, because it treats two households with identical salaries as financially identical. They never are.
Consider two people who each earn $150,000. One has a large mortgage, several dependents, and children approaching college age. The other rents, has no dependents, minimal debt, and substantial assets. The same income, the same multiplier, and two completely different amounts of actual exposure.
A more reliable approach is to name the specific things you want the coverage to handle, price each one, and add them up. That produces a number you can explain and defend, and it makes later adjustments far easier because you know what you were solving for.
For a fuller picture of what coverage is and how it works, see how life insurance works and what life insurance is.
What a multiplier leaves out
- Mortgages
- Debt
- Income structures
- Children
- Education goals
- Existing coverage
- Assets
- Care responsibilities
- Future obligations
Households with the same income can differ across all nine of these. A multiplier cannot see any of them.
Start with what you’re protecting
Before the amount, decide on the purpose. A coverage figure only makes sense once you know which obligations it is expected to meet, and who is relying on it.
Income replacement
Usually the largest item. Ask how many years your household would need to stay financially stable while it adjusts, and what annual amount it would need during that period. A family with young children and one primary earner typically needs a longer runway than a household where both partners work.
Be honest about the timeframe. Some expenses fall away as children become independent and a mortgage is cleared. Others, like ongoing care, do not.
Debt and obligations
Mortgages, vehicle loans, student loans, credit balances, and business obligations do not pause when someone dies. For many people this is the easiest place to start because the figures are already written down. Check whether shared debts would transfer rather than disappear.
Final expenses
Funeral costs, outstanding medical bills, and the immediate administrative expenses that land on a family in the first weeks. These are often smaller than the first two categories, but they arrive fastest, which is exactly when a family is least able to absorb them.
Education
If funding a child’s or grandchild’s education is part of your plan, treat it as a defined future cost. You do not need to project tuition inflation to two decimal places, but you should decide whether this is something the policy is meant to cover or something that will be handled another way. Life insurance is not automatically the best funding route for education, and it is worth comparing options before assuming it is.
Care responsibilities
If you support a parent, a sibling, or a family member with ongoing needs, that responsibility does not disappear. It either transfers to someone else or it goes unmet. Both outcomes are worth planning around explicitly.
The value of unpaid work
A parent managing a household, childcare, and logistics is performing work with real replacement cost, even when no salary is attached to it. Households frequently undercount this. If something happened to the person doing that work, the family would likely pay to replace at least some of it.
Households with children, a single income, or a family member requiring ongoing support tend to see this most clearly. If that describes your situation, the family coverage guide goes further into how these obligations interact.
Two categories the estimate does not put a number on are worth raising anyway. A policy’s living benefits riders can matter a great deal if the insured person becomes seriously ill, and the questions worth asking an agent are a useful way to test any recommendation before you act on it.
Length matters too
How much coverage is only half the question. How long it lasts is the other half, and it is the part people skip.
A common and sensible approach is to match the term to the obligation. A 20 year mortgage suggests coverage lasting at least until the mortgage is cleared. Children reaching independence suggests a term that runs until that point. A business obligation with a fixed end date suggests a term that ends with it.
This is why term length is a real decision rather than a formality, and why buying the longest available term is not automatically the right call. Paying for decades of coverage after the obligation it was meant to meet has ended is simply a different way of getting the number wrong.
Match the mortgage
Coverage that runs at least until the loan is cleared.
Match the dependents
Coverage that lasts until children are independent.
Match the obligation
Coverage that ends when a fixed commitment ends.
The trade offs between term and permanent coverage, including how each behaves over time, are covered in term versus permanent.
The coverage you can sustain
The best coverage amount is also one you can afford to keep paying. Coverage that lapses after four years because the premium became unsustainable has protected no one, and a family that dropped a policy to make rent is in a worse position than one that carried a smaller policy throughout.
If the honest number is beyond your current budget, it is usually better to start with solid coverage you can maintain and add to it later as your income grows than to stretch for a figure you cannot sustain.
The estimate above is a starting point, not a target to stretch for.
It describes the obligations you identified. What you actually put in place is a separate decision, and one that should fit what you can realistically maintain for as long as the protection is needed.
You have the number. Now let’s build the strategy.
A coverage estimate is a starting point. The right strategy depends on what you’re protecting, how long you need the protection, what you already have, and what you can realistically sustain.
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Related ABNORMAL RESERVE resources
The estimate answers one question. These go into the ones that usually follow it.
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