You have taken a 35-year mortgage at 32, which means it runs until you are 67, and somewhere in a quiet moment the thought has surfaced: what are the real chances of dying before the mortgage is paid off? It is a fair question, and it has a proper answer rather than a salesman's one. The honest reply is that the risk is small but not negligible, that it is higher for men than for women, and that it climbs steeply the older you are when you borrow. Better still, you can read the actual figure for someone of your age and sex straight from an official table, and this guide shows you exactly how.
The source is the Office for National Statistics national life tables. They are free, they are the same tables actuaries start from, and they let you calculate the chance of dying between any two ages rather than accept a round number someone quoted you. No insurer's marketing figure is needed and none is used here.
What the tables will not do is decide anything for you. They give you a probability. What you do about it, if anything, is a separate question, and we come to it at the end.
At a glance
- The chance of dying during a mortgage term is calculated from ONS national life tables, not guessed. You can do it yourself in two lines of arithmetic.
- For a borrower in their early thirties over a full 35-year term, the risk runs to a low double-digit percentage for men and a high single-digit percentage for women.
- The number rises sharply with the age you borrow, because a later start pushes the end date into ages where annual mortality is far higher.
- A 40-year term taken in your thirties runs past state pension age, into the years where the chance of dying in any given year climbs fastest.
- Decreasing term cover is designed to track a repayment mortgage balance down, so the payout broadly matches what is still owed.
The short answer, and how to get your own number
Across a 35-year term starting in your early thirties, the probability of dying before the end sits in the single figures to low double figures as a percentage. It is consistently higher for men than for women, and it grows with every year you add to your starting age. That is the shape of it. The precise figure for you depends on your exact age and sex, and it is sitting in a published table you can open in a minute.
The reason it is worth doing yourself rather than trusting a quoted statistic is that the honest number is neither reassuringly tiny nor alarmingly large, and both extremes get repeated online. The tables let you replace an argument with a calculation.
How to read it off the ONS life tables yourself
Open the ONS national life tables for the UK and look at the column headed lx. This is the number of people, out of a notional 100,000 born, still alive at each exact age. It falls, slowly at first and then faster, as age increases. That single column is all you need.
The chance of dying between the age you are now and the age the mortgage ends is:
(survivors at your current age − survivors at the end age) ÷ survivors at your current age.
In other words, read off lx at your current age, read it off again at the age the mortgage ends, subtract the second from the first to get how many of your starting group die in between, and divide by the number who were alive at the start. Multiply by 100 for a percentage. Use the male table if you are a man and the female table if you are a woman, because the two differ enough to matter. That is the whole method, and it works for any pair of ages, any term, any starting point.
Source: Office for National Statistics, National life tables, UK (1980–1982 to 2022–2024), published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
A worked example: borrowing at 32 on a 35-year term
A 35-year mortgage taken out at 32 ends at 67. So you want the chance of dying between exact age 32 and exact age 67. Read the survivors figure at 32, read it again at 67, take the difference, and divide by the figure at 32.
When you run that calculation on the current male table, the answer lands in the region of a low double-digit percentage; on the female table it is a high single-digit percentage. Put plainly, roughly one in ten men and a somewhat smaller share of women who reach 32 do not reach 67. It is not a coin toss, but it is a long way from impossible, and it is spread across thirty-five years in which a mortgage sits secured on the family home. Rather than take those bands on trust, do the subtraction with the exact lx values for your own age and sex; the point of the method is that you can.
That is the number for death alone. It says nothing about the far larger chance of a serious illness that stops you earning long before it kills you, which is a real risk over the same period and a reason people look at cover that pays out on diagnosis as well; we cover one version of that in whether a mortgage is paid off on a cancer diagnosis.
Why the number rises so fast with the age you borrow
The single biggest lever on the answer is not the length of the term but the age you finish. Mortality rises with age at an accelerating rate, so a term that ends at 70 crosses far riskier years than one that ends at 55, even if both are the same number of years long. Starting later is doubly costly: you borrow older and you finish older.
| Age when you borrow | Term | Age it ends | What happens to the risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 25 years | 55 | Lowest of these: the whole term sits in relatively low-mortality years. |
| 32 | 35 years | 67 | Higher: the term reaches into the mid-sixties, where annual mortality has climbed. |
| 40 | 30 years | 70 | Higher again: a later start and an end at 70 both push the figure up. |
| 35 | 40 years | 75 | Highest here: the term runs well past state pension age into steeply rising mortality. |
Read the exact percentages off the table for each pair of ages and you will see the same pattern every time: the end age, not the label on the product, is what moves the risk. A 40-year mortgage, increasingly common as prices have stretched affordability, is not just five more years than a 35-year one. It is five more years tacked on at the far end, where each additional year carries more risk than any year near the start.
Which table to trust: period rates or future improvements
There is one honest complication worth knowing. The standard national life tables are period tables: they assume the mortality rates recorded during the reference years stay fixed for the rest of your life. In reality mortality has tended to improve over time, so a period table can somewhat overstate the true lifetime risk for a young person.
To allow for expected future improvements, the ONS also publishes cohort or projected life tables, which build in the changes mortality is expected to undergo as you age. Those generally give a slightly lower probability of dying before a given age than the period tables do. For a rough sense of the risk the period tables are perfectly good and easier to find; if you want the more forward-looking figure, the projection-based tables are the ones to use.
Source: Office for National Statistics, Past and projected data from the period and cohort life tables and the 2022-based national population projections life tables, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
What the probability does not capture
A single percentage flattens a few things that matter. It treats you as an average person of your age and sex, when your own health, occupation and family history move the real figure in either direction. It counts only death, when the more common event over a mortgage term is a period out of work through illness or injury. And it is silent on the size of the problem it describes, because the damage is not the death itself but the balance left outstanding when it happens and the income that stops.
That is why the probability is a starting point, not a conclusion. A one-in-ten chance of an event that would cost your family their home is treated very differently from a one-in-ten chance of a minor inconvenience, and rightly so. The question is never only how likely, but how bad if it happens, and to whom.
What this means for cover
If you decide the risk is worth insuring, the shape that fits a repayment mortgage is decreasing term cover. The sum assured is designed to fall over the term broadly in step with a repayment balance, so the payout tracks what you still owe rather than the sum you originally borrowed. It is built for exactly this job, and because the amount reduces over time it is usually the least expensive way to cover a shrinking debt, though what any policy costs depends on your age, health and the term.
A few practical points sit alongside the raw odds. Cover generally becomes harder to arrange and more limited the older you start, which is another reason the age you borrow matters; our guide on what an over-50s plan actually buys shows how the economics change at older ages. If a good deal of your family's security currently rests on an employer's or a company scheme, remember that such cover can end when the job does, as it does when a director retires and relevant life cover stops. And whatever you arrange, do not confuse a mortgage-linked policy with a plan for the funeral and immediate costs, which is a separate need that can arrive before any savings plan for it is fully paid up. If you want to see what covering your own balance and term would involve, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price it against your actual mortgage.
Scotland and Northern Ireland
The method is identical wherever you live in the UK, and the ONS national life tables cover the whole of the United Kingdom. Mortality does vary by nation and region, though, so a UK-wide figure is an average rather than a local one. The National Records of Scotland publishes life tables for Scotland, and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency publishes them for Northern Ireland, if you want a figure calculated on your own nation's mortality rather than the UK average.
The rules around the mortgage and the estate also differ by nation once a death has happened, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but the probability of the event itself is calculated the same way everywhere: survivors at your age, minus survivors at the end age, over survivors at your age. For a broader working-age comparison, our piece on a working-age director's real odds of dying this decade runs the same tables over a shorter horizon, and our hub on life events that change who depends on you gathers the related guides together.
Frequently asked questions
How likely is it that I die before a 35-year mortgage is repaid?
Small, but not negligible, and it rises sharply with the age you borrow at. ONS national life tables give the probability of someone of your age and sex reaching the age at which the mortgage ends, and for a borrower in their early thirties on a full 35-year term that risk runs to a low double-digit percentage for men and a high single-digit percentage for women. Read the exact figure off the table for your own age and sex.
Where do these mortality figures come from?
From the ONS national life tables for the UK, built from registered deaths and population estimates and published for three-year periods. They give the chance of surviving from one age to another, separately for men and women, and are the standard starting point for actuaries. The National Records of Scotland and NISRA publish equivalent tables for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Does the risk change if I take a longer mortgage term?
Yes, in two ways. A longer term pushes the end date into older ages where mortality is higher, and it leaves a balance outstanding for more years. A 40-year term taken in your thirties runs past normal retirement, when the chance of dying in any given year is far greater, so the extra years add disproportionately more risk than years near the start of the term.