Is ten times my salary enough life insurance if I have children?

It might be, but it is a coincidence if it is. A salary multiple looks at what you earn and not at what your family owes or needs. Two people on identical salaries can need very different amounts depending on the mortgage, the number of children and how old they are. Use it as a sanity check once you have worked out your number, rather than as the way you arrive at it.

How much life insurance do I need to cover a £200,000 mortgage?

At least £200,000 if clearing the mortgage is the goal, sized to run for as long as the mortgage has left. Whether that should be level cover or decreasing cover depends on the type of mortgage. On a repayment mortgage the balance falls, so decreasing cover is often the sensible fit. On an interest only mortgage the balance does not fall, so decreasing cover would leave a gap that grows every year.

Do I still need life insurance if my employer provides death in service cover?

Usually yes, for two reasons. The amount is a multiple of your salary rather than a calculation about your family, so it rarely matches what would actually be needed. And it belongs to your employer, so it generally ends on the day you leave the job. Treat it as a useful reduction to your number rather than the answer to it.

How much life insurance does a stay at home parent need?

Enough to pay for what they currently do. If a parent at home were gone, the working parent would be paying for childcare, wraparound care and holiday cover, and quite possibly reducing their own hours as well. It is a real cost and it tends to be underinsured, because there is no salary attached to it to prompt the question.

Is £100,000 of life cover enough for a family with two children?

It depends almost entirely on the mortgage. If the mortgage is nearly paid off and the children are teenagers, it may well be. If there is a £200,000 mortgage and a toddler, it is likely to fall a long way short of clearing the debt, let alone replacing an income for fifteen years. Work through the four steps above and you will know within a few minutes.

How Much Life Insurance Do I Need With a Mortgage and Children?

The short answer, in about two minutes

Add up what would still need paying if you were not here, then take off what would already be there to pay it.

That is the whole method. Four things go on the first list: what is left on your mortgage, the income your household would lose, the childcare or extra help that would suddenly be needed, and the cost of the funeral. Two things come off the second: any cover you already have through work, and any savings you would be happy to see spent.

The number you are left with is your starting point. It is usually larger than people expect and smaller than the internet tells them, and it is worth saying now that you do not have to insure all of it. Plenty of families cover the mortgage properly and then take whatever they can comfortably afford towards the rest. That is a perfectly reasonable place to end up.

The rest of this page is the detail, and the three worked examples further down are the part most people find genuinely useful.

Why “ten times your salary” tends to miss for parents

You will see the ten times salary rule everywhere, and it is not a bad conversation starter. As a way of sizing cover for a family with young children, though, it has an obvious problem. It is a calculation about you, and the money is needed by them.

Two people earning the same £40,000 get the same £400,000 answer. One has no dependants and rents. The other has a £250,000 mortgage, a three year old, a baby, and a partner who works four days a week. The rule cannot tell them apart, because it is only looking at the payslip.

Salary multiples also miss the thing that makes the loss of a parent expensive in a way the loss of an income alone is not. When a parent is gone, the household does not simply lose their earnings. It usually loses some of the surviving parent’s earnings too, because someone has to do the school run, the sick days and the holidays that two people were splitting between them.

So the multiple is a fine sanity check at the end. It is a poor place to start.

Step one: the mortgage

This is the easy one, and it is worth doing first because it is the part almost everybody agrees on.

Look at your most recent mortgage statement and find the outstanding balance. Not what you borrowed, and not what the house is worth. What is left.

That figure is the amount that would need clearing so nobody has to sell the family home in the same year they lose a parent. If you have other debts that would not disappear, a car finance agreement or a loan, add those in too. Credit card balances are worth a thought, though small ones tend to get swallowed by the rest of the number.

You will hear that decreasing cover is the obvious choice here, because a repayment mortgage shrinks and so does the cover, which makes it cheaper. Often that is right. It is worth knowing that decreasing cover falls on a schedule set by the insurer rather than tracking your actual balance, and that the two do not always move at the same speed. If you are on an interest only mortgage, where the balance does not fall at all, decreasing cover is usually the wrong shape entirely. That is a conversation worth having properly rather than guessing at, and it is one of the more common things advisers get asked about. We have run the numbers on that properly in our guide to level or decreasing cover.

Step two: the income, until the youngest is grown

Take your take home pay, the figure that actually lands in the account, and multiply it by the number of years until your youngest child turns eighteen.

If you take home £2,400 a month and your youngest is three, that is £28,800 a year for fifteen years, which is £432,000.

That number will look enormous, and it is worth pausing on why it is not quite as alarming as it first appears. A lump sum that size is not sitting in a drawer being spent at exactly that rate. Some of it clears the mortgage, which removes the largest monthly outgoing straight away. Some of it can be invested. The surviving parent usually still earns. And Child Benefit and, in some circumstances, Bereavement Support Payment may be available, which are worth checking on GOV.UK rather than guessing at.

So treat this as the honest top of the range rather than the target. Most families take a good look at it, decide what proportion of it they want to protect, and get on with their lives.

Step three: the childcare bill that appears out of nowhere

This is the part almost every other guide skips, and it changed significantly in March 2026, so a lot of what is written about it online is now out of date.

Working parents in England can get 30 funded hours of childcare a week for children from nine months to four years old. Coram Family and Childcare reported in March 2026 that this has made a part time nursery place theoretically free during term time for families who qualify, and cut the cost of a full time place by 39% on the previous year. That is a genuinely large improvement and it is worth knowing about.

There are two catches, and they both bite hardest in exactly the situation we are talking about.

The first is that the funding covers 38 weeks a year. The other fourteen weeks, which is most of the school holidays, you pay for. The second is bigger. Eligibility is tied to working and earning above a minimum threshold. If the surviving parent stops work, or drops their hours far enough that they fall below it, the funded hours can go with them. Coram’s figure for families who do not qualify is an average of £189 a week for a part time nursery place.

So the mechanic to be aware of is this. The support is real and it is generous, but it is conditional on being able to keep working, which is precisely the thing that gets difficult when you are suddenly parenting alone. If you think the surviving parent would need to reduce their hours, put a figure in for childcare and for the holiday cover, and check your own position on GOV.UK rather than assuming it carries on unchanged.

For a rough sense of the wider picture, the Child Poverty Action Group put the cost of raising a child to eighteen at £250,000 for a couple and £290,000 for a lone parent in its Cost of a Child 2025 report. Those are whole childhood figures covering a minimum acceptable standard of living, not an insurance calculation, but they do tell you the scale of what a household is carrying.

Step four: what you already have

Now the number starts coming down, which is the more enjoyable half of this exercise.

Death in service through work. Many employers provide life cover as a benefit, usually a multiple of your salary. Drewberry’s 2026 benchmarking survey of 626 HR and finance professionals found two times salary to be the most common level, followed by three times. Group Risk Development reported 12,730 group life claims paid across the UK in 2025, at an average of £143,436, so this is real money and it does get paid.

Two things to know about it. It is not yours, it is your employer’s, so it usually ends on the day you leave the job. And the amount is a multiple of your salary rather than a calculation about your family, so it is a coincidence if it happens to match what you need.

Savings. Include what you would genuinely be happy to see spent on this, not the emergency fund you would want kept intact.

Any cover you already hold. Old policies from a previous mortgage have a habit of still running. Worth checking.

Take those off your total. What is left is your gap.

Three households, worked end to end

These are illustrative. The figures are chosen to show the method rather than to describe anybody real, and your own numbers will differ. What they are useful for is seeing the shape of the answer.

Item	Two earners, two under five	One earner, three children	Lone parent, one child aged seven
Mortgage outstanding	£220,000	£180,000	£150,000
Income to replace	£470,000	£640,000	see note
Cost of raising the child	included above	included above	£177,000
Childcare and holiday cover	£16,000	£24,000	nil
Funeral	£4,000	£4,000	£4,000
Subtotal	£710,000	£848,000	£331,000
Less death in service	£76,000	£104,000	£68,000
Less savings	£12,000	£5,000	£8,000
Gap	£622,000	£739,000	£255,000

The two earner household. He takes home £2,450 a month, she works four days. The children are two and four. Income is replaced for sixteen years, until the youngest turns eighteen. Childcare goes in at £4,000 a year for four years to cover the holidays and the wraparound care the funded hours do not stretch to. His employer pays two times his £38,000 salary.

The single earner household. He earns £52,000 and takes home around £3,150 a month. She is at home with three children aged one, four and seven. Income is replaced for seventeen years. Childcare goes in at £8,000 a year for three years, on the assumption she returns to work, which is also what would make her eligible for the funded hours. Worth noting that this household needs cover on her as well, because if she were gone he would be paying for everything she currently does. That is a separate calculation and it is not a small one.

The lone parent household. She earns £34,000 and her daughter is seven. Here the question is different, because there is no surviving parent’s income to top up. Somebody else would raise her daughter, so the sum is the mortgage plus the cost of doing that. Using the Child Poverty Action Group lone parent figure of £290,000 across eighteen years, and eleven of those years remaining, that is around £177,000. Her employer pays two times salary.

Three things stand out from that table. The numbers are large. They are also very different from each other despite three salaries that are not wildly apart, which is exactly why a salary multiple struggles. And the third household’s number is less than half the first, mostly because the mortgage is smaller and the child is older.

Which brings us to the useful part.

Why two smaller policies usually beat one big one

Look again at the first household. Of that £622,000, some £220,000 is the mortgage, and that portion has a known shape. It falls every month as the mortgage is paid down, and it disappears entirely the day the mortgage ends.

The rest of it does not behave like that at all. The children need raising whether the mortgage is at £220,000 or nil.

So rather than buying one large policy that stays level for twenty five years, families often end up with two. Decreasing cover sized to the mortgage and running for the same term. Level cover sized to the family, running until the youngest is independent. Because the decreasing half costs less than the same amount of level cover, the two together are usually cheaper than one big level policy covering the lot.

It also means the two halves can be sized and timed separately, which is more useful than it sounds. Your mortgage has a fixed end date. Your children becoming independent does not, quite, and it is rarely the same year.

What a finished number tends to look like

Somewhere between the mortgage on its own and the full gap.

That is not a dodge. Very few families insure the entire figure, and there is no rule saying they should. What tends to happen is that the mortgage gets covered properly, because that is the piece that would force the biggest and fastest change, and then whatever is comfortable goes towards the rest.

The reassuring part is that the mortgage half is usually the cheaper half, so the piece that does the most work is also the piece that costs the least. It is also worth knowing that these policies do pay. The Association of British Insurers reported £7.84bn paid in protection claims across the UK in 2025, with 97.9% of individual claims paid.

If the whole number is not affordable right now, cover what you can and revisit it. A policy that exists is worth a great deal more than the perfect one you did not take out.

How the answer changes as your children get older

Downwards, mostly, and steadily.

Every year the mortgage falls, the number of years of income you would need to replace falls too, and the childcare years shrink. The lone parent household above needed £255,000 with a seven year old. The same household with a seventeen year old and ten more years of mortgage payments behind it would need a fraction of that.

This is why people who take out cover in their thirties often find it looks generous by their late forties, and why it is worth a look every few years, particularly after a move, a remortgage, a new baby, or a change in what either of you earns.

It is also, quietly, the argument for sorting it sooner. Cover is priced on your age and your health at the point you apply, and both of those only move one way.

How much life insurance do you actually need when you have a mortgage and young children?