Income protection

There’s no right age to take out income protection. Illness and injury can happen at any age. However, as the cost of buying income protection is based on the age you are when you take out your plan, the sooner you take it out, the lower your premium may be. 

To see how likely you are to suffer from an illness or injury before you retire, you can try our health risk calculator.

Our income protection plan is designed to be flexible enough to start paying you a replacement income once your employer’s sick pay reduces or stops – but if you’re self-employed or in a partnership, you can set the deferred period yourself. 

In other words, if you don’t have any sick-pay provision, you can choose to have the plan pay out as soon as you’re forced off work.

The amount of benefit you get will depend on the level of cover you take out. However, there are some maximum limits. For doctors and dentists, the maximum pay-out is £4,000 per week. For other occupations, it’s £2,500 per week.

In terms of how long you receive it for, it’s up to you. The standard benefit payment period is 2 years, but you can extend this to 5 years or to a period that takes you right up to your ‘plan end age’.  

Your plan end age is the age at which your cover will stop. You can always change this later down the line.

To successfully claim benefit under your income protection plan, your illness or injury must prevent you from fulfilling your role. By this we mean that because of your illness or injury, you are totally unable to carry out your essential duties. Essential duties are those that cannot be left out without affecting your ability to do your job.

We’ll always need to see a medical report from your doctor before we can pay out, and sometimes we may require you to provide more details or evidence too. There’s more detail on how we assess your claims in the Key Features Document.

We don’t penalise you for being unwell. There’s no limit to the number of claims you can make. All we ask is that you restart paying your premiums when your claim ends so that you maintain your cover.

Yes, as your career progresses and your family circumstances change, you can ask us to alter your plan at any time. That might be increasing (or reducing) your cover, putting your cover on hold temporarily, or simply changing the deferred period or plan end age.

You don’t need to tell us if you change your occupation or role – even if you take up a totally new career. Our income protection cover is flexible enough to move with you.