How much term insurance does a working woman need?

The question that decides it

Not whether you are married. Not whether you have children. The question is whether anybody's financial life gets harder if your income stops permanently. Parents who depend on you, a sibling whose education you are funding, a home loan somebody would inherit, a partner who could not carry the EMI alone. Any of those is a yes.

This is the part that gets skipped for women. Life cover is treated as something the primary earner arranges, and in a lot of households a woman's income is still described as secondary even when the family could not function without it.

Term cover versus everything else

Term insurance pays out if you die during the policy term and pays nothing if you survive it. People dislike this, which is why endowment and money-back policies sell so well. Those bundle a small amount of cover with a poor investment return and charge for both.

The practical consequence is the cover amount. For the same premium, term insurance buys many times the protection of an endowment plan. A woman paying ₹30,000 a year into a policy with ₹5 lakh of cover would typically get well over a crore of cover from term insurance for a fraction of that, and could invest the difference separately.

Working out the number

Start with income replacement, ten to fifteen times annual income depending on how many years of dependency remain. Add outstanding loans, since those do not disappear. Add large future commitments such as education. Subtract what already exists in savings, investments and employer-provided cover.

A worked example. Annual income ₹12 lakh, so income replacement of around ₹1.5 crore. Home loan of ₹40 lakh. Existing investments of ₹20 lakh. That puts the requirement near ₹1.7 crore.

Two things that void the whole thing

Declare everything on the proposal form. Existing conditions, medication, family history, smoking. A claim rejected years later for non-disclosure defeats the entire purpose, and the person dealing with that rejection is the person you bought the policy for.

Name a nominee and tell them the policy exists. Insurers cannot pay a claim nobody files. Keep the policy number somewhere findable rather than only in your own email.

Premiums, product features and tax treatment vary by insurer and change over time. This is general information, not a recommendation of any specific policy.