Life Insurance Calculator

Most “how much life insurance” answers stop at a multiple of income. That is a starting point, not an answer. This calculator does the full version: what your family would actually need, minus what they would already have.

What Goes in the Survivor Benefits Boxes

This is the hardest input on the page, because the honest answer is that survivor benefits are not one number — they are a schedule that steps down over time, and for most families it steps all the way down to zero for a couple of decades. That is why there are two boxes instead of one.

Social Security: generous early, then a gap

A Social Security statement typically shows three separate figures — a benefit for each child, a benefit for a spouse caring for a child, and a benefit for the spouse in their own right at full retirement age. They are not alternatives, and they are not additive without limit either:[2]

• They stack, up to a family maximum. A child’s benefit plus a caregiving spouse’s benefit are paid at the same time, but total household survivor benefits are capped — generally somewhere around 150–180% of the worker’s own benefit amount. Two children plus a spouse will usually hit that ceiling, so do not simply multiply.
• The caregiver benefit ends when the youngest child turns 16 — not 18. Children’s benefits continue until 18 (or 19 if still in high school).
• Then comes the gap. After the last child’s benefit ends, a surviving spouse generally receives nothing from Social Security until age 60, when a reduced survivor benefit becomes available, or their full retirement age for the unreduced amount. That window is often fifteen to twenty-five years with no Social Security at all. It has a nickname among planners — the blackout period — and it is one of the clearest reasons term life exists.

So the first box takes the combined monthly amount while your children are dependent, and the number of years that lasts — usually until your youngest turns 16 or 18. Do not average the later years into it; the calculator handles the rest separately.

VA benefits: smaller, but they never stop

If you are a veteran with a service-connected rating, your family may have something Social Security does not provide: a benefit that continues for life without a gap. VA disability compensation itself ends at death and is not inheritable — but a surviving spouse may qualify for Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC), which is a separate, flat, tax-free monthly payment for life.[3]

Where a death is not itself service-connected, the usual route to DIC is that the veteran was rated totally disabling for the ten years immediately before death. The 2026 base rate is $1,699.36 a month, with meaningful additions: $360.85 where the veteran was rated totally disabling for the eight full years before death and married throughout, $421.00 for each child under 18, and a $359.00 transitional amount for the first two years when there are minor children. DIC continues for life unless the surviving spouse remarries before 57, and since January 2023 it is paid in full alongside a Survivor Benefit Plan annuity rather than offsetting it.

Why the delayed one is worth less than it looks

A benefit that starts in twenty-five years is not worth what the same benefit would be worth today, and the difference is large enough to change the answer. Take a $3,704 monthly benefit paid for 25 years. Valued as though it began immediately, that is about $825,000 in present value. Starting twenty years out, it is worth about $509,000 — a gap of over $315,000. That is why the retirement-age benefit has its own box rather than being lumped in with DIC: treating a deferred benefit as though it starts now would quietly remove a third of a million dollars from the coverage a family actually needs.

Two judgment calls worth making deliberately. Enter the amount for the age you would actually claim — a survivor benefit taken at 60 is permanently reduced, so if your partner would claim early, use the reduced figure and set the age to 60. And if a benefit that far out feels too speculative to count, leave the box at zero. Sizing the policy without it is the conservative choice, and a benefit twenty-five years away is the part of any plan most likely to change.

Get your own figures rather than estimating: Social Security amounts are in your my Social Security account, and DIC eligibility and rates are on VA.gov. Neither requires a paid service to obtain.

How to Read the Result

The headline number is coverage to buy: the total your family would need, minus what they would already have. It is normal for that figure to be several times your income — and equally normal for it to be zero if the mortgage is gone, the kids are grown, and the portfolio is large. That crossover is the point at which people stop renewing term policies, and it is a good thing to reach.

The inputs that move the number most

• Years of support needed. Identify when the household could remain financially secure without the insured person’s future earnings. Choose coverage through the latest of:
  • The youngest child becoming financially independent.
  • The surviving partner accumulating enough retirement resources. In practice this usually means funding them all the way to their own retirement age, not to some earlier point where the balance merely looks healthy. A partner whose support ends at 55 still has a decade to cover before any pension, Social Security, or penalty-free withdrawal is available — and the monthly table under the calculator will show that stretch as a trough.
  • Major debts being repaid.
  • College or other promised education funding being secured.
  • Any other dependent no longer requiring support.
  Then add a three-to-five-year margin and round up to the next available policy term.
• Share of income the family still needs. Households do not need 100% of a lost income — that person’s own expenses go with them. Somewhere between 70% and 80% is a normal planning figure.
• Survivor benefits. Social Security pays survivor benefits to a surviving spouse caring for a young child and to the children themselves, and for many families this is a meaningful offset. It is also easy to overestimate: benefits for a caregiving spouse generally stop when the youngest child turns 16, and children’s benefits end at 18 — which is why the calculator asks how long they last separately. Get your household’s real figures from your Social Security account rather than guessing.[2]
• Return and inflation. The gap between them is what matters, not either number alone. The default of 5% against 2.5% assumes the payout is invested conservatively — appropriate for money a family is drawing down, and deliberately below a stock-market assumption.

What Counts as Funeral, Medical & Estate Costs

These are the bills that arrive in the first weeks, before income replacement matters at all. They are separated from the mortgage and other debts because they are immediate and close to certain. Four buckets:

• Funeral and burial or cremation. The national median is about $8,300 for a funeral with viewing and burial, or about $6,280 with cremation.[4] Read those medians carefully — they exclude cemetery costs. The plot, opening and closing the grave, and a marker typically add several thousand more.
• Unpaid medical bills. Deductibles, copays, out-of-network charges, and whatever a final illness leaves behind. Health insurance rarely ends at zero.
• Estate settlement. Probate filing fees, an attorney if the estate needs one, and executor costs. Assets that pass by beneficiary designation — retirement accounts, life insurance itself — skip probate; assets that pass by will do not.
• Loose ends. Final bills still arriving, and often travel so family can gather.

That is why the field defaults to $15,000: a median burial funeral, plus cemetery costs, plus a modest allowance for medical and estate expenses. Planning on cremation and a simple service? $8,000–$10,000 is more realistic. A burial with a large service in a high-cost metro can run past $20,000.

Traditional and Roth Are Not Worth the Same

Retirement accounts belong in the picture — they are often a family’s largest asset, and they pass efficiently, going straight to a named beneficiary outside probate. But a dollar of traditional and a dollar of Roth are not the same dollar to the person who inherits them, which is why they get separate rows.

Traditional money has never been taxed. A traditional 401(k), IRA, or TSP is ordinary income to whoever withdraws it. The tax is owed eventually no matter who inherits — but when it comes out depends entirely on the beneficiary, and a spouse is treated very differently from anyone else.

A surviving spouse is not on a ten-year clock. You may have read that an inherited retirement account has to be emptied within ten years. That rule exists, but it applies to most non-spouse beneficiaries — an adult child, a sibling, a friend. A surviving spouse is what the IRS calls an eligible designated beneficiary, and is specifically excepted from it.[5] A spouse who is the sole beneficiary can elect to treat the account as their own, or keep it as an inherited IRA and draw it over their own life expectancy. Neither path forces the money out on a deadline.[6]

So the calculator reduces the traditional balance by a tax rate before counting it. At 22%, a $150,000 traditional balance counts as $117,000.

You do not have to work that rate out. The Assumptions box fills itself in as you type. Since no deadline forces the pace, it assumes the survivor spends the account across the same support window you entered in Section 1 — balance divided by years of support — adds that to their income, subtracts the standard deduction, and reads off the marginal rate that lands on, using 2026 single-filer brackets and the $16,100 standard deduction.[8] On the defaults, $150,000 spread over 18 years is about $8,300 a year; on top of a $45,000 income that is roughly $37,200 taxable, which falls in the 12% bracket. Shorten the support window or raise the balance and the rate climbs.

It is an estimate, and deliberately a simple one. It ignores state income tax. It uses single-filer brackets, which is the conservative choice — a survivor can file jointly for the year of death, and as a qualifying surviving spouse with a dependent child for two years after that, both of which are more favorable. And it applies one flat marginal rate rather than working bracket by bracket, year by year.

If you know better, type your own number in. A survivor who will keep working and spend the account fast belongs at a higher rate; one who can leave it until retirement and draw it against little other income belongs lower. Once you edit the box it stops updating and keeps whatever you entered.

Roth money has already been taxed, and qualified withdrawals come out tax-free. It counts at full value, and it is the cleanest asset a family can inherit. That is one more argument for the Roth side of the funding order — and worth remembering that if you contribute Roth to a TSP or 401(k), any employer match still lands in the traditional side.

What the Payout Actually Buys

A coverage number on its own is hard to argue with, because it is hard to picture. The panel under the results breaks it into the two different jobs the money does, and then into the only figure most families really reason about: what arrives each month.

Day one: the money that gets spent, not invested

Some of the payout never becomes income. It is spent almost immediately, and it is spent on things that would otherwise sit on a surviving partner in their worst month — the mortgage, the car loan and the cards, the funeral and the medical bills the illness left behind. The college money and the emergency cushion are set aside rather than spent, but they are equally unavailable to live on.

Whatever is left after all of that is the only part that produces income. On a large mortgage the split is often surprising: more than half the policy can disappear on day one, and the monthly income comes from a much smaller pot than the headline number suggests. That is the single most useful thing this panel shows.

Then: what actually arrives each month

The remaining pot is assumed to be invested at your real return and drawn down evenly across the support window — a level income, in today’s money, that runs out exactly when the support period ends. The table adds the three other things arriving in the same month: the surviving partner’s own salary, and whichever survivor benefits are actually being paid at that point.

Which is why it is a table and not a number. Household income under this plan is not flat — it steps down as the children’s benefits end, drops again when the policy money is exhausted, and steps back up when the partner’s own benefits begin. Comparing each row against your target is how you decide whether the plan is actually the shape you want.

The last row is only half the retirement picture

The final row shows benefit income — DIC, the partner’s own Social Security — and nothing else. Read on its own it looks alarming, because it is not what they would be living on. It leaves out the balance they arrive at retirement holding.

That balance is the whole point of buying enough coverage. Money the family never had to spend keeps compounding for the entire stretch between the claim and retirement, which on a young family is often twenty-five years or more. The line under the table projects it forward at your real return, so you get a starting figure for the retirement years rather than a monthly income that looks impossible.

Once you have that projected balance, this calculator has done its job. Where it goes next — how it is invested, what it can safely pay out, how a pension or the partner’s own savings stack on top — is Investing for Retirement.

One honest limitation

The need side of this calculator runs for the years of support you enter. The benefit side values a lifetime benefit over its whole life — DIC to the planning age, a retirement-age benefit for as long as it is paid. When those two horizons differ, the total at the top can say the need is met while the monthly table still shows a shortfall in the early years, because some of the credited value does not arrive until after the support window closes.

That is not a contradiction so much as two different questions: will this family be all right over a lifetime, and will they be all right for the next twenty years. The panel reports the second, which is the one a term policy is actually buying. When the two disagree, the note under the table tells you how much of the benefit value is landing outside the window, so you can decide which question you want the number to answer.

Turning the Number Into a Policy

Once you have a figure, the rest of the decision is covered in Insurance Basics, and it is short:

1. Buy level term, for a period that covers the years above — typically 20 or 30 years. A fixed premium for the whole term, and nothing bundled into it.
2. Insure both parents, including a stay-at-home parent. Replacing that labor is a genuine cost, and this calculator handles it if you enter the value of the childcare and household work rather than a salary.
3. Skip policies on children. Nobody depends on a child’s income. Those dollars belong in a 529 or custodial account.
4. Name and update the beneficiaries. The policy pays whoever is on the form, not whoever is in the will — see Wills & Beneficiaries.
5. Re-run this every few years, and after any birth, move, raise, or mortgage change. The number falls over time for most families, which is exactly what should happen.

Back to Insurance Basics for the rest of the coverage picture, or the emergency fund that sits in front of every policy you own.