About this site
It exists to help you work out whether income protection is worth having, and what a policy would actually pay you, before you speak to an insurer or a regulated adviser.
The arithmetic, and the rules behind it
Working out whether income protection is worth having comes down to two separate jobs: doing the arithmetic on your own numbers, and knowing what the rules say before you rely on them.
Doing the arithmetic
A calculator runs in your browser, built around the figures you enter. It takes your savings, your outgoings and any sick pay you'd get, and shows how many weeks you could manage without income before a policy needed to start paying.
It works only with what you give it, and nothing you enter leaves your browser. The answer is still yours to weigh up, with an insurer or a regulated adviser.
Reading the rules
Alongside the calculator are guides covering the ground it can't reach on its own:
- What unable to work means under a policy's own occupation, suited occupation and any occupation tests, and which jobs the difference tends to decide.
- How insurers establish earnings for someone whose income moves around, and what a lean year can do to the figure.
- What statutory sick pay pays and for how long, and where it stops reaching.
- What happens from the day you tell an insurer you can't work, through to a decision on the claim.
Where a figure or a rule appears, it carries the document it came from and the date it was checked. Insurers don't all set their rules the same way, particularly on how they treat self-employed earnings, and where that's true the guides say so rather than picking one version and presenting it as the only one.
A calculator built on your own figures
You enter your own savings and outgoings; the tool works from those.
Rules with their source attached
Each rate, cap or threshold carries the document it came from and the date it was checked.
How figures are sourced
A rate or a rule on its own doesn't tell you much. The statutory sick pay rate, the cap an insurer puts on the earnings it will cover, the way it works out what you earn if you're self-employed, each of those is written against the document it came from. You can see where it's drawn from and judge it on that basis.
Why the date matters
Insurers update their rules, and the law changes too. A figure that was correct on the day it was written down can be out of date by the time you read it. That's why the date a figure was read sits next to it, so you can see how current it is.
Where insurer rules differ
Insurers don't all use the same method for working out earnings or the same cap on cover, particularly for the self-employed. Where that's the case, the range across insurers is set out, and you're pointed back to your own policy document, or to your insurer, for the rule that actually applies to you.
A source tells you where a figure came from. It doesn't tell you that the rule hasn't moved since, which is exactly why the date travels with it.
Who you buy a policy from
Who chooses the policy
Taking out income protection means choosing a specific policy with a specific insurer, and that choice is yours. It's made with the insurer directly, or with a financial adviser who holds the right permissions to recommend a particular product for your circumstances. Nothing on this site amounts to that recommendation.
What this site does instead
No policy is sold, arranged or recommended here. What you'll find is the arithmetic behind the decision: how long your savings and sick pay would carry you, what an insurer's cap means for the cover you could actually get, what a deferred period costs you in waiting time. You work through that with your own figures and reach your own answer. The calculator can only work with what you put into it, and a policy document or an adviser may still tell you something they don't.
How the sources are linked
Where a rate, a rule or a figure appears, it links to the document it came from, a policy wording, a government page, the statute itself. None of those links are paid for, and none are there because an insurer has an arrangement with the site.
Before you take out, change or cancel a policy, speak to a regulated financial adviser or the insurer directly. The figures and examples here are there to help you understand the decision, not to stand in for that conversation.