Life Insurance Benefits

Life insurance is one of the most common employer-provided benefits. It is especially popular with employees who have dependents and with older employees who may have difficulty getting reasonably priced life insurance elsewhere.

What Type of Life Insurance? 

Most employers offer group-term life insurance as an employee benefit, although other types can be offered. Term insurance is life insurance that is in effect for a certain period of time only.  Generally, in the case of employer-provided term life insurance, the term is for as long as the employee is employed. Group-term life insurance can be offered to employees only, not to their spouses and children. 

To take advantage of the tax deduction for group-term life insurance (i.e., the value of up to $50,000 in insurance is tax-exempt for the employee), you must have at least 10 full-time employees. The 10-employee restriction does not apply if you provide coverage to all full-time employees, the method for computing the amounts of insurance is set (such as a uniform percentage of the employee's yearly salary), and no physical exams are required to obtain coverage. 

Plans can come with an infinite number of riders that you can add to your plan and that will allow you to customize your plan to a degree. A rider is an additional feature or benefit that you can add on to an existing insurance policy. For example, in the case of health insurance, you could purchase a mental health coverage rider that would add some coverage for mental health treatments to your basic medical insurance. In the case of life insurance, you could add an accidental death and dismemberment rider to a group-term life insurance policy that would pay double the death benefit if the employee was killed due to an accident. Your insurance agent can explain the various riders you can get in conjunction with a life insurance policy.

How Much Life Insurance? 

Most group-term policies offer either a set amount of insurance (for example, a $10,000 policy for each employee) or are based on the employee's salary (for example, policy values of one, two, or three times the employee's yearly salary). In some cases, you can allow employees to purchase life insurance in $1,000 increments, the cost of which is based on their age.