Critical Illness Insurance Cost Calculator

How Do I Calculate How Much Critical Illness Cover I Need?

To figure out how much Critical Illness Insurance you need you’ll firstly need to establish what the payout is for. Some of the most common expenses our clients use their payout for include:

• Their outstanding mortgage balance
• Other loan repayments
• Everyday expenses such as bills, the weekly shop council tax etc.
• Medical treatment
• Carers or domestic helpers
• Therapy and rehabilitation treatments
• Modifications to your home to accommodate a disability
• Medical / mobility equipment.

It’s important to consider the consequences of becoming critically ill and what that would mean for your finances. While your mortgage might be your biggest worry, if you only cover the outstanding balance you may not have anything left to live on if your illness stops you working.

If you know the level of cover you require you can use our critical illness cost calculator to compare premiums from the top UK insurers including Aviva, Vitality and Royal London 😊

How Do I Work Out the Cost of Critical Illness Cover?

Insurers base the cost of Critical Illness Insurance on both personal factors about you as an individual as well as on various policy factors, such as the size of the payout.

Personal Factors

You can’t change most of the personal factors that determine your Critical Illness Insurance premiums. To calculate the cost of cover, your insurer will look at your:

Age

Older adults are more likely to develop critical illnesses, so the older you are when you take out cover the more expensive it will be.

Current State of Health / Medical History

Your insurer will want to know factors such as your height and weight when you apply for cover. They’ll also want to know about any health conditions you have, or any serious and / or hereditary conditions that your immediate family (parents and siblings) might suffer from.

If you have a health condition, an insurer might:

• Offer the policy on standard terms (so you won’t face higher premiums or any difference in your policy’s terms compared to a healthy individual)
• Cover the condition for a higher premium
• Exclude the pre-existing condition(s).

This will depend on the condition, its severity, your overall health and the insurer’s appetite for this risk.

Smoker Status

Smokers can pay almost twice as much in monthly premiums as non-smokers. This is due to the greater risk of them developing critical conditions, especially cancer, heart attacks and strokes, which make up the vasty majority of Critical Illness Insurance claims.

Lifestyle / Hazardous Activities

Most insurers ask about your lifestyle, such as your alcohol consumption and whether you take part in dangerous hobbies (for example rock climbing, motocross racing or regular skydiving).

If any aspects of your current lifestyle increase the risk of you being critically ill or suffering a critical injury, your insurer may place an exclusion on your policy for injuries resulting from hazardous hobbies or increase your premiums.

Policy Options

As well as the above personal factors, there are some policy options which impact your premiums. These are choices you make about your insurance, so you can use them to adjust the cost of Critical Illness Cover to fit protection to your budget. They include your:

Level of Cover / Sum Assured

How much you’ll get as a tax-free payout if you become critically ill. It’s perhaps the most important factor insurers use when calculating Critical Illness Insurance premiums for you.

The higher your benefit, the higher your premiums.

The relationship between the level of cover and its cost is fairly linear — premiums for a policy insuring you for £200,000 are likely to be roughly double those of a policy with £100,000 of cover.

Policy Cease Age / Length of Cover

How old you’ll be when the policy ends.

As you get older, the risk of serious illness grows. Premiums therefore become more expensive the longer you run a policy for. While many insurers offer cover all the way into your 70s (providing you take out a policy before a certain age), this will be costly.

You can lower your policy’s cease age to reduce your premiums. However, think carefully about this. It may not be worth ending cover early just to save money — you could find yourself without protection when you need it the most.

Type of Cover

You have two options with Critical Illness Insurance:

• Level cover
  The benefit stays fixed over time, so the policy pays out the same amount in the first year as in the last.
• Decreasing cover
  The benefit falls over time, reaching zero by the end of the policy.

Level protection is best for covering interest-only mortgages, where the outstanding capital balance doesn’t fall over the life of your loan so you need protection for the full value across your entire mortgage.

You might also use it where the policy is to provide financial security, such as replacing lost wages or providing funds to adapt your home.

Decreasing protection is better for straightforward repayment mortgages, where the amount you owe the lender falls over time as you make repayments. You set decreasing cover to match the rate at which your outstanding mortgage reduces each month.

With decreasing cover, the risk to the insurer in terms of the size of the payout falls over time. That makes decreasing Critical Illness Insurance the cheaper of the two options.

Example Policy Premiums

To properly compare Critical Illness Insurance quotes, we’ve made a number of assumptions about the individual the policy will cover. For instance, we’ve assumed that they are:

• In good health
• An office worker (an accountant)
• Looking for £100,000 worth of Life and Critical Illness Insurance
• Applying for cover for themselves only (i.e. not jointly with a partner)
• Seeking cover up to the age of 65.

The monthly Critical Illness Insurance premiums in the table below represent the cheapest quotes for an individual matching these criteria.

How Do I Compare Policies and Providers?

Critical Illness Insurance is a very competitive market. Not only are there multiple insurers, but each one has a slightly different offering. You should look out for the following factors when you compare Critical Illness Cover:

Number of Illnesses

Each provider varies slightly in terms of how many critical illnesses they cover.

Most policies cover between 35 and 40 critical conditions as standard. However, some providers protect you against more than 100 conditions while others cover fewer than 10, so it pays to check carefully.

Depending on your insurer, you might also be able to enhance your policy for an extra premium each month. This entitles you to a payout for a larger number of illnesses / injuries.

Illness Definitions

Insurers also vary in terms of the definitions of the illnesses they cover. These definitions are important as you must meet the criteria for an illness detailed in the policy documents to make a successful claim.

Partial Payouts

Some insurers pay out on a sliding scale depending on the severity of the illness you develop. So, for example, if you develop a low-grade, in-situ cancer and catch it early, you might not get your entire benefit because you don’t meet the full definition for cancer in your policy documents.

Other insurers pay out a proportionate benefit (commonly the lower of £25,000 or 25% of your benefit) if you develop a less serious, or ‘additional’, illness that isn’t quite as severe as the main conditions the policy covers.

Survival Period

Most insurers have a survival period. This requires you to live for a certain number of days after receiving a critical diagnosis before becoming eligible for a payout. Survival periods can vary between 10 days to 2 weeks or more, so check carefully.

Additional Benefits

It’s becoming increasingly tricky for insurers to compete in terms of the number of conditions they cover as the industry has added more and more conditions to Critical Illness policies over time.

In light of this, one of the key ways insurers now try to differentiate themselves instead is in the additional benefits they offer.

These are services that come with your Critical Illness Insurance policy and are almost always free. Some of the best include:

• Remote GP appointments
• Second medical opinion services, offering access to some of the best medical experts in the world if you want another clinical opinion on your diagnosis or treatment
• Medical helplines to provide telephone access to teams of trained nurses to discuss health concerns
• Hospitalisation benefit, offering a payout if you spend a certain period in hospital as an inpatient.

Some policies also include children’s Critical Illness Cover for free, while others require you to pay an additional premium. This pays out if a child develops one of the adult critical illnesses listed in the policy, as well as based on a set of child-specific illnesses / injuries.

Compare the Best UK Critical Illness Insurance Companies

Drewberry compares Critical Illness Insurance quotes from the following leading providers in the UK market:

• Aegon
• AIG
• Aviva
• Guardian
• Legal & General
• Liverpool Victoria (LV=)
• Royal London
• Vitality
• Zurich.

Which Insurers Pay the Most Claims?

Most people understandably want to choose cover by picking the insurer that’s the most likely to pay a claim when they need it the most.

However, it’s actually fairly hard to distinguish one provider from another in this area. Payout rates across the industry are not only higher than many people assume but are also fairly uniform.

As you can see in the table below, in 2019 almost all insurers paid out on more than 90% of the claims they received.

Should You Consider Income Protection?

There is another option to protect against illness or injury you might want to consider: Income Protection Insurance.

Rather than paying out on diagnosis of a critical illness, Income Protection pays out for anything that medically prevents you from doing your job. This can mean it covers you for a wider number of conditions, including those insurers don’t deem ‘critical’, such as bad backs and mental health problems.

Income Protection also pays a regular monthly income (a proportion of your earnings) instead of a single lump sum. This can make it easier for you to manage your finances if you can’t work rather than trying to stretch a single lump sum payout over an unknown period.

The best Income Protection pays out for any accident or sickness which stops you doing your specific job. It can also pay out until retirement if you can’t ever return to work depending on the policy you choose.

To get a better understanding of the difference between these two types of insurance, read our Income Protection vs Critical Illness Cover Guide.

Use Our Critical Illness Insurance Calculator & Get Expert Advice

Working out the best Critical Illness Cover for your circumstances can be a bit of a minefield. There’s a lot to think about when you start taking into account all of the different insurers, the number of illnesses they cover and the definitions of those illnesses each provider uses.

On top of this, you also need to research the best policy to fit with your own personal circumstances, health and lifestyle.

Fortunately, the team at Drewberry has all the tools and know-how to find you the best Critical Illness Insurance.

Why Speak to Us?

We started Drewberry™ because we were tired of being treated like a number.

We all deserve a first class service when it comes to issues as important as protecting our health and our finances. Below are just a few reasons why it makes sense to talk to us.

• There is no fee for our service
• We are an independent insurance broker who work with all the leading UK insurers
• You’ll speak to a dedicated expert from start to finish
• We are very proud of the 3027 and growing independent client reviews rating us at 4.92 / 5
• Claims support when you need it most.
• We are authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. You can find us on the financial services register here 🧐
• Claims support when you need it most.

For help and fee-free advice, don’t hesitate to give us a call on 02084327333 or email help@drewberry.co.uk.