Life insurance pricing looks opaque from outside, but the inputs are few and their relative weight is fairly predictable.
What matters most?
Age and tobacco status, by a wide margin. Then health history. Everything else adjusts around those.
That ordering is worth internalising, because it tells you where attention is repaid. Worrying about whether a job title sounds risky is usually wasted effort; being straight about tobacco is not.
Why does age dominate?
Because it is the strongest available predictor of how soon a claim arrives, and it is the one input that moves in only one direction.
The price is fixed when the policy is issued and holds for the term. What changes is the cost of starting a policy later. Every year of delay prices the same cover higher, permanently, and no amount of subsequent good health undoes it.
This is the one genuinely time-sensitive thing about buying cover, and it is unrelated to anybody’s sales pressure. It is arithmetic.
Why does tobacco carry so much weight?
Because it is the largest single lifestyle factor in mortality, and insurers price accordingly.
It also covers more than people assume: cigarettes, beedi, cigar, chewing tobacco, gutkha, khaini, pan masala, hookah and e-cigarettes. Not just smoking.
Declaring it raises the price. Not declaring it puts the claim at risk, and undeclared tobacco use is among the most common reasons a claim is contested. The arithmetic here is stark — you save some premium for at most three years, and expose the entire sum assured while doing so.
How much does health history move the price?
It depends on what, when, and how well controlled — which is why vague disclosure works against you.
A condition that is diagnosed, treated, stable and documented is an ordinary underwriting matter with an ordinary price attached. The same condition described in three vague words invites the underwriter to assume the least favourable reasonable interpretation, because they have nothing else to go on.
If you have dates, medications and recent results, supplying them tends to produce a better answer than making the underwriter ask.
What barely registers?
Most occupations, most hobbies, and most of what people worry about.
Insurers ask about hazardous work and pursuits because a minority of them genuinely change the risk. Office work does not. Ordinary sport does not. The list they ask about is specific — armed forces, mining and tunnelling, explosives, work at height, aviation, offshore — and if you are not on it, it is not affecting your price.
What can you still influence?
Timing, accuracy, and how well your case is presented. Not the underlying facts.
Timing is the big one, and it only points one way.
Accuracy protects the claim rather than the price, which is the more valuable thing to protect.
Presentation matters more than people expect. The same medical history, described precisely rather than vaguely, is assessed on what it actually is rather than on what it might be.
Why does this site not show any prices?
Because a premium is set by the insurer after it has assessed a full application, and no figure published before that can be relied on.
Anything shown earlier is either a generic illustration that will not be your price, or a guess. A figure that turns out to be contradicted at underwriting is worse than no figure at all — you would have made plans around it.