LIC term insurance
Term insurance is the simplest thing an insurer sells and the least understood. You pay a premium; if you die during the term, your family receives the sum assured. If you survive the term, you get nothing back, and that is the point — nothing is being set aside for you, so almost all of your premium is buying cover.
That is why term is far and away the cheapest way to buy a large sum assured. A savings plan asks the same money to do two jobs; a term plan does one job properly. If the reason you are buying insurance is that someone would struggle financially without your income, term is the product that answers that need directly.
The trade-off is real and worth stating: there is no maturity value, no surrender value worth the name, and no loan against the policy. People who dislike term insurance usually dislike exactly this — the feeling of paying for something and getting nothing. What they are getting is the cover, for the years their family needed it.
How much cover is enough
The honest starting point is not a multiple of salary. It is the sum of what your family would actually have to fund without you: the income they would lose for the years they would need it, any loan that would otherwise fall on them, and any goal — a child’s education, most often — that would go unfunded.
Then subtract what already exists: your savings, your existing policies, your employer’s group cover. The gap is what you need to insure, and it is usually larger than people expect and cheaper to cover than they fear.
The life cover calculator on this site works through exactly that arithmetic and shows you the assumptions it used, so you can argue with them.
What to check in the brochure before you buy
The maximum age at maturity, because a term plan that ends at 65 does nothing for a dependent spouse at 70. The exclusions, particularly the suicide clause in the first policy year. Whether the death benefit is level throughout or reduces, which is how credit-linked term plans work. And whether premiums are payable for the full term or a shorter period.
Each plan page here lists these from the plan’s own brochure, with a link to the PDF so you can read the clause yourself rather than take our word for it.
LIC's active term plans
Eligibility and benefit wording on each page is read from that plan’s own LIC brochure.
LIC's Bima Kavach
UIN 512N360V01
View plan →Term insuranceLIC's Digi Credit Life
UIN 512N358V01
View plan →Term insuranceLIC's Digi Term
UIN 512N356V02
View plan →Term insuranceLIC's New Tech-Term
UIN 512N351V02
View plan →Term insuranceLIC's Saral Jeevan Bima
UIN 512N341V01
View plan →Term insuranceLIC's Yuva Credit Life
UIN 512N357V01
View plan →Term insuranceLIC's Yuva Term
UIN 512N355V02
View plan →Work out your numbers
Each of these shows the formula it used and the assumptions it made, so you can check the result rather than trust it.
How much life cover do you need
Estimate the life cover required to replace your income and clear your liabilities, using the income-replacement method.
Open calculator →Goal planner
Work out what a future goal will cost after inflation, and what you would need to set aside each month to get there.
Open calculator →Common questions
- Does LIC pay anything back if I survive a term plan?
- No. A pure term plan pays the death benefit if you die during the term and nothing if you survive it. That is what makes the cover cheap — none of the premium is being accumulated on your behalf. Some plans offer a return-of-premium variant, which costs substantially more for the same cover.
- Is term insurance cheaper if I buy it younger?
- Yes, and the difference persists for the life of the policy. Premiums are set from your age at entry and do not rise afterwards, so a policy bought at 28 stays priced at 28-year-old rates for its whole term. Waiting five years does not just delay the cover, it permanently raises what it costs.
- Can I take a loan against a term policy?
- Generally no. A policy loan is advanced against a surrender value, and a pure term plan does not build one. If borrowing against a policy matters to you, that is a reason to hold a savings plan alongside term cover, not a reason to replace the term cover with one.
Go deeper
What exactly does my family get if I die?
It is usually not simply "the sum assured". Here is how the death benefit is actually built up.
Read the answer →What happens if I stop paying my premiums?
The answer depends almost entirely on how many years you have already paid. Stopping early and stopping late have very different consequences.
Read the answer →I just bought a policy and I am having second thoughts.
You have a free look period to read the actual policy document and return it for a refund if it is not what you expected.
Read the answer →Still deciding?
You can work through all of this yourself — that is what the calculators and plan pages are for. If you would rather talk it through with someone who does this for a living, that is available too.