Protection Needs Assessment

What the Protection Needs Assessment does

This tool is a seven-question triage that tells you which types of international protection are most likely to matter for someone in your situation — and, just as importantly, where you may already have a gap. Rather than asking you to price policies or guess at sums assured, it walks through the factors advisers weigh first: where you live, how you earn, who depends on you, what cover you already hold, what debts you would leave behind, roughly what you earn, and what you most want to protect. It is built for internationally mobile professionals and expats, whose cover is often a patchwork of UK policies, employer benefits and half-remembered arrangements that may no longer do what they think. The result is a prioritised shortlist you can take into a proper review with confidence about what to ask.

How the assessment actually works

There is no black box here — the logic is deliberately transparent. You answer seven multiple-choice questions and the tool applies a fixed rule set to your responses. Two things happen in parallel. First, it runs a cover-gap check against your existing-cover answer. Selecting “none” or “UK employer death-in-service only” triggers a red cover gap alert, because death-in-service ends the moment you leave the employer and is not portable abroad. Selecting “personal UK policy (may not be valid abroad)” triggers an amber policy-validity warning, because UK policies frequently carry residency conditions that can be contested on an overseas claim. If you have dependants and no internationally valid cover, an extra urgency note appears on top.

Second, it runs a recommendation engine that maps your answers to product categories. Your primary priority carries the most weight: protecting your family's lifestyle leads with international term or whole-of-life assurance; protecting against serious illness leads with critical illness cover; protecting your earnings leads with income protection; and building an estate plan leads with universal life. Your other answers then shape the supporting recommendation — being self-employed or a company director pushes the secondary product towards income protection, having dependants brings life cover forward, and an income at or above £250,000 surfaces universal life for its estate-planning uses. Choosing “all of the above” returns a full protection review that layers life, illness and income cover together.

A worked example

Suppose you are a self-employed consultant living in the UAE, with a partner and children, no protection in place beyond a lapsed UK policy, a mortgage above £500,000, an income in the £250,000–£500,000 band, and a priority of keeping your family's lifestyle secure if you die. The assessment would lead with international term or whole-of-life assurance to replace your income and clear the mortgage, add income protection as the secondary layer because you have no employer sick pay, raise a red cover-gap alert on your non-existent valid cover, and attach an urgency note because dependants plus no valid cover is the highest-priority combination it recognises. That single screen tells you exactly which three conversations to have first.

Key assumptions and limitations

The assessment is a signposting tool, and its simplicity is both its strength and its boundary. It does not price cover, calculate a sum assured, or read the small print of any policy you already hold — so it cannot confirm whether your UK policy will actually pay out abroad, only flag that it might not. It works from broad income bands rather than your real figures, and it does not net off your wider wealth: someone with substantial savings, investments or sellable property may need far less cover than their headline situation suggests. It also treats your stated priority as decisive, which is reasonable for a first pass but can understate needs you did not rank first. To put an actual number on a life-cover shortfall, use the companion Cover Gap Calculator; for the fuller needs-analysis method, see our guide to the expat protection needs assessment.

How to read your result — and what to do next

Read the output as a map, not a verdict. The recommended products tell you which categories of cover to prioritise; the cover-gap and validity alerts tell you how urgent the first move is; and the answers summary lets you sanity-check that the tool understood you. If a red alert appeared, the practical priority is arranging portable, internationally valid cover before anything else — a policy written while you were UK-resident may not respond cleanly once you live abroad, which is precisely why expats need international protection. If the tool paired critical illness with income protection, the guide on choosing between the two will help you decide how to split your budget. And if it surfaced universal life for estate planning, that often sits alongside a wider inheritance tax review.

Whatever the result, treat it as the start of a conversation. A short review with a protection specialist will translate this shortlist into cover that is correctly sized, correctly structured, held in trust where appropriate, and — critically for internationally mobile clients — valid wherever life takes you. Cover is not a one-off purchase either: it should be revisited every two to three years, or whenever your income, mortgage, family or country of residence changes.