Part-Time Work and the Death in Service Multiple

If you work part time — three days a week, school hours, term time only — your death in service benefit may or may not be reduced to match, and it is not made pro rata by any law. Whether a part-time contract shrinks the payout comes down to one choice your scheme has already made: does it multiply the pay you actually receive, or does it multiply the full-time salary the role would carry if you did it five days a week?

That single decision can be the difference between two otherwise identical members. Multiply actual pay, and a three-day week produces roughly three-fifths of the full-time benefit. Use the full-time equivalent figure, and the same person, doing the same hours, is covered for the full amount. Same job, same desk, very different sum left behind.

Nothing on your payslip tells you which basis your employer uses. It lives in the scheme's definition of salary, and this page shows you how to find it and what it means for the people who depend on you.

The short answer: it depends which salary the scheme multiplies

A group death in service benefit is almost always expressed as a multiple of salary — commonly something like three or four times, though the multiple itself varies from employer to employer. The multiple is only half the sum, though. The other half is the salary figure it gets applied to, and for a part-time worker that is where everything is decided.

There is no rule that forces an employer to reduce the benefit in proportion to your hours, and no rule that forces it to protect you either. The scheme sets its own definition of pensionable or insured salary, and part-time members simply inherit whatever that definition says. So the honest answer to "is mine reduced?" is: read the definition, because the scheme could have gone either way and you cannot tell from your contract alone.

What you can say for certain is that the choice matters enormously. For someone working substantially fewer hours than full time, the gap between an actual-pay basis and a full-time-equivalent basis is not a rounding difference. It is a large slice of the money your household would have to live on.

Actual pay versus full-time equivalent

Two definitions do almost all the work here.

Actual pay. The scheme multiplies the salary you are genuinely paid for your part-time hours. Work three days of a five-day week and your insured salary is the three-day figure, so the benefit is calculated on that. This is the more common approach in private sector group life, and it is the one that reduces the payout in line with your hours. It is not hidden or unfair — it simply insures the pay you actually draw — but it does mean a part-time member is covered for less than a full-time colleague on the same hourly rate.

Full-time equivalent. The scheme multiplies the salary the role would pay at full-time hours, sometimes called a notional or whole-time-equivalent figure, and applies it regardless of how many days you actually work. On this basis a three-day-a-week member is covered as though full time. Several public service schemes are built this way, which is one reason a part-time role in the public sector can carry a strikingly larger death benefit than a similar part-time role elsewhere. If you want to see how far a public service scheme can go in the family's favour, our piece on what a police pension pays a family when an officer dies serving shows the shape of one such arrangement.

Neither approach is wrong, and an employer is entitled to choose either. The problem is only ever the mismatch between what a part-time member assumes and what the definition actually says.

What that means in practice

Picture two people doing the identical job at the identical hourly rate. One works five days a week, the other three. Their employer applies a four-times-salary benefit.

On an actual-pay basis, the three-day worker is insured for roughly three-fifths of what the five-day worker is insured for, because that is the proportion of the full-time salary they are paid. On a full-time-equivalent basis, both are insured for the same amount, because the calculation ignores the difference in hours. Nothing about the person, the job or the risk has changed between those two outcomes — only the definition in the scheme rules.

The reason this lands so hard is that the benefit is meant to stand in for years of lost income and to keep a roof over the family. A household does not have three-fifths of a mortgage or three-fifths of a childcare bill. Its outgoings are whole numbers, whichever parent worked part time, so a benefit cut to match reduced hours can fall well short of what the family still has to find each month.

Term-time-only contracts

Term-time-only working — common for teaching assistants, catering, cleaning and support staff around schools — adds a further wrinkle, and it usually cuts the same way.

Because a term-time contract is paid for the weeks actually worked across the year, the annual earnings figure it produces is lower than the full-time-across-the-year rate. Where the scheme multiplies actual annual earnings, that lower figure feeds straight into the death benefit, so the reduction can be steeper than the raw day-count suggests. Where the scheme uses a full-time equivalent salary, term-time working generally does not pull the benefit down in the same way, because the calculation starts from the whole-time rate rather than what landed in your account.

If you are on a term-time contract, this is worth pinning down precisely, because two schemes could produce noticeably different figures for the exact same job. It is one of several ways employer cover can quietly shrink around a working pattern chosen for family reasons — the same thing happens, for different reasons, when someone gives up work to care and loses the cover that left with the job.

How to check which basis your scheme uses

You do not have to guess. Three sources will tell you.

• The scheme's definition of salary. This is the decisive document. Look in the scheme booklet or policy for how "salary", "pensionable pay" or "insured earnings" is defined. Phrases such as full-time equivalent, whole-time equivalent or notional salary protect part-time members. Phrases such as actual pay, salary payable or your earnings do not.
• Your annual benefits statement. Many statements show the resulting sum insured in pounds. Compare that figure with your actual part-time salary: if it looks like a multiple of your real pay, the scheme is on an actual-pay basis; if it looks like a multiple of the full-time rate, it is using the equivalent figure.
• A direct question to HR. Ask, in writing, whether the death in service benefit for part-time staff is based on actual salary or full-time equivalent salary. Keep the reply. The pay you are relying on for a payout should not rest on a half-remembered conversation.

Because the benefit follows how your pay is defined, it is also worth knowing that other pay arrangements can change the figure — most notably the way salary sacrifice can reduce the salary a payout is calculated on unless the scheme uses a notional pre-sacrifice figure.

Why this hits part-time parents hardest

The people most exposed to an actual-pay definition are, disproportionately, parents who moved to part-time hours to raise children — and they are often the households where a death would bite hardest.

A parent working three days a week has usually not stepped back from earning because the money stopped mattering. They have stepped back because someone had to be at home, and the family reorganised around one and a half incomes rather than two. If the part-time parent dies, the surviving parent faces the full cost of childcare precisely because the person who provided it is gone — and a death benefit trimmed to part-time pay meets less of that cost, not more. The benefit shrinks in the same direction as the need grows.

This is also why the reduction can be invisible until it is tested. A part-time parent glancing at "life cover through work" reasonably assumes it reflects their contribution to the household, which is far larger than their salary. The scheme, if it is on an actual-pay basis, only ever insured the salary. Cover arranged during shared parental leave or a change of hours is worth re-checking for exactly this reason.

If the number falls short

If you check and find the benefit is a fraction of what your family would actually need, the fix is not to argue with the scheme's definition — that is fixed by the employer's policy — but to close the gap yourself.

A personal policy is set at an amount you choose, not at a multiple of part-time pay, so it can be sized against the whole cost of replacing what you do: the mortgage, the childcare a surviving parent would have to buy in, and the years until the children are grown. It also stays with you if you change employer or change hours again, which a work benefit does not. And because a part-time work benefit can arrive later than a family expects, it is worth understanding separately whether a death in service payout tends to arrive in time for the first urgent bills.

If you want to see what covering the gap would involve, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker set the amount against your real household costs rather than your reduced hours. Setting the figure against what the family spends, not what you earn part time, is the whole point.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

How a scheme defines salary is a matter of the scheme's own rules and its insurance policy, not of national law, so the actual-pay versus full-time-equivalent distinction works the same way for a part-time employee in Scotland or Northern Ireland as it does in England and Wales.

The one place to take extra care is the public service schemes, several of which are run under separate Scottish and Northern Ireland arrangements. Where those schemes use a full-time equivalent basis they generally protect part-time members in the same way, but the detail is set out in each scheme's own rules, so check yours directly. The broader map of how employer cover is put together sits in our guide to death in service and employer cover.

Frequently asked questions

Is death in service pro rata for part-time staff?

It depends on the scheme. Private sector group life usually multiplies your actual pay, so a three-day week produces a proportionately smaller benefit. Several public service schemes use full-time equivalent salary instead, which gives a much larger figure for exactly the same hours worked. There is no law making the benefit pro rata, so the only way to know is to read the scheme's definition of salary.

Which figure does my scheme use?

The scheme booklet's definition of salary settles it. Look for the words full-time equivalent, whole-time equivalent or notional salary, which protect part-time members, as against actual pay or salary payable, which do not. Your annual benefits statement should show the resulting sum insured in pounds, which you can compare against your real salary to see which basis has been applied.

Does term-time-only working reduce the benefit?

It can, where the scheme uses actual annual earnings, because term-time contracts pay less across the year than the full-time rate. Schemes based on full-time equivalent salary generally do not reduce it. Check which basis applies, because it changes the figure substantially and a term-time contract can cut the benefit by more than the day count alone would suggest.