Six Months a Year Abroad

If you spend around six months a year abroad and the rest in the UK, you can almost always still hold UK life insurance — but the application takes a detour most people never expect. Somewhere between your answers going in and a decision coming back, the insurer sends a foreign travel and residence questionnaire. It is a form you never see advertised and rarely hear about until it lands in your inbox, and for someone who splits the year it can decide more about your terms than your blood pressure does.

The short version is reassuring. For a settled pattern of living — a UK base, a second home abroad, and regular flights between the two — most insurers barely react. What moves the needle is the destination, not the sheer amount of travel. A person in good health who spends four months a year in a country the insurer treats as high-risk can be rated or even excluded for that alone, while someone with a managed condition who winters in Spain is waved straight through. That is the part that surprises people: does travelling affect life insurance? Yes, but through where far more than how often.

This page explains what the questionnaire actually asks, why a named country can change your terms whatever your health, and how splitting the year differs from the two situations insurers worry about much more — emigrating for good, and moving your tax residence out of the UK.

The document you only meet after you apply

Most life applications begin the same way: health questions, height and weight, smoking, family history. If your answers show a normal life in one country, that is usually the end of it. But if you tick the box that says you spend significant time outside the UK — and half the year plainly qualifies — the insurer routes your case to a second stage and issues a residence and foreign travel questionnaire.

It is a plain document, and it is not a trap. Its job is to turn "I live abroad half the year" into something an underwriter can price. Typically it asks for the countries you visit, the specific regions within them, how many weeks a year you spend in each, why you go, where you stay while you are there, whether you take part in any hazardous activities while away, and whether you hold — or intend to hold — residence anywhere other than the UK.

None of that is about catching you out. It exists because "abroad" is not one risk. Six months in a coastal town in Portugal and six months in a remote region with no reliable hospital are not the same proposition, and the insurer has no way of telling them apart from the main form alone. The questionnaire is how the two get separated. Complete it precisely, describe the pattern you actually live rather than an optimistic version of it, and you give the underwriter what they need to say yes on sensible terms.

Why the destination matters more than the number of trips

The instinct is to assume that more time away means a worse decision. In practice the map matters far more than the calendar. Underwriters group countries by the risks they carry — the standard of local healthcare, the level of political stability, the prevalence of certain diseases, and the availability of reliable medical evidence if a claim ever needed checking.

For most of western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, spending months at a time there generally makes little or no difference to the terms. These are places the insurer can underwrite around comfortably. The picture changes for regions with active conflict, limited healthcare infrastructure, or a high burden of infectious disease. There, extended stays draw closer attention — not as a judgement on you, but because the environment itself carries measurable additional risk.

This is why two applicants with identical medical histories can get very different answers. The one with a second home abroad in a low-risk country and the one who spends the same months in a high-risk region are, to the insurer, carrying different risks entirely. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office publishes country-by-country travel advice that broadly tracks the concerns underwriters have, and it is worth reading before you apply so nothing in the decision surprises you.

Source: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, foreign travel advice, gov.uk, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Rated, excluded or postponed: the three things a country can trigger

When a destination does concern an insurer, the response takes one of three shapes, and the difference between them matters a great deal for someone who lives there half the year.

The first is a premium loading: the cover works everywhere, including that country, but you pay more to reflect the added risk. For most people who split the year this is the workable outcome, because the cover still follows you wherever you are.

The second is a territorial exclusion. Instead of charging extra, the insurer agrees to cover you but carves out a named country or region — death arising while you are there, or from a specified hazard there, is not covered. This can be perfectly fine if the excluded place is somewhere you rarely go. It can be useless if it is the very country you spend six months a year in. Read that wording with real care: an exclusion that removes cover for routine time at your second home defeats the point of buying it.

The third is a postponement, usually tied to a specific trip rather than your settled pattern — for example, until you return from an extended stay somewhere the insurer will not cover at all for now. That is less common for a stable UK-and-abroad routine and more common for one-off travel into a genuinely high-risk area.

The practical lesson is to look past the headline price. A cheap policy with an exclusion covering half your year is worse than a loaded one that covers you everywhere. If a broker presents an offer with a territorial exclusion, ask plainly whether it bites on the country you actually live in.

Splitting the year is not emigrating

Insurers draw a firm line between three things that sound similar and are not: travelling, splitting your life across two countries, and emigrating. Getting the wrong side of that line — in either direction — is where people come unstuck.

If you keep a UK home, remain UK tax-resident and simply spend long stretches at a property abroad, most insurers still treat you as a UK life for a UK policy. You are, in their eyes, someone who travels a lot rather than someone who has left. That is the case this page is about, and it is the more forgiving one.

Emigrating is a different question with a different answer, and if that is where you are heading you want the detail set out in our guide on whether a UK policy follows you when you retire to Spain and the wider question of whether a UK policy stays valid if you emigrate. The reverse situation — arriving in the UK and applying while your right to live here is time-limited — is covered in UK life insurance on a Skilled Worker visa. All three sit alongside this one because the residence question runs through every one of them, and the answers are genuinely different.

What counts as residence, and why the tax question appears

The word the questionnaire keeps returning to is residence, and it is doing more work than it looks. Insurers care about it for two reasons. The first is medical: where you are ordinarily resident affects how quickly you can reach reliable healthcare and how well your medical history can be verified. The second is practical and regulatory: a UK life policy is designed and sold to people connected to the UK, and if your centre of life shifts abroad the product may no longer be the right one, or in some cases available at all.

That is why you will be asked whether you hold residence anywhere else, whether you have applied for it, and sometimes about your tax position. It is not the insurer prying into your finances for its own sake — it is establishing that a UK policy still fits your circumstances. Tax residence is a specific legal status determined by rules such as the Statutory Residence Test, and if your pattern of days abroad is edging you towards non-UK residence that is worth understanding in its own right, both for the insurer and for you. HMRC sets out the test in its guidance, and it does not turn on a simple "six months" rule of thumb.

Source: HM Revenue & Customs, Statutory Residence Test guidance, gov.uk, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Hazardous activities you do while you are out there

The questionnaire also asks what you actually do at your destination, because a second home is often where people take up the pastimes they do not have at home. Diving, skiing, mountain routes, powered watercraft, motorbikes on unfamiliar roads — these are assessed the same way they would be for any UK applicant, but they surface here because the travel form is where they come up.

Occupation can appear too, if any of your working time happens abroad. A physically hazardous trade is rated on its own merits wherever it is carried out; the principles are the same ones set out for a heavily rated UK trade in our piece on aerial chainsaw work on a life application. The point for a part-year resident is simply that the foreign travel questionnaire is the place these details land, so answer them as fully as you would the health questions. An activity you do abroad but leave off the form is exactly the kind of thing that can undermine a claim later.

Once cover has started, does the travel have to be reported?

A common worry is whether every future trip has to be reported, or whether taking on more time abroad after the policy begins breaches something. For a standard UK term policy, the duty to answer accurately bites when you take out the contract — and again if you later vary it — rather than continuously throughout its life. If you answered the residence and travel questions honestly at the time, a later change in your travel pattern is generally not something you must report on an ordinary term policy, though you should always check your own wording, because a minority of contracts do attach ongoing conditions or notification requirements to overseas travel.

The same "when does the duty bite" logic applies to other changes in your life after cover starts, and it is worth understanding the general rule rather than guessing policy by policy — we set it out in the context of a habit changing after cover begins in whether you must tell the insurer you have started smoking. And if you are anxious about how much of your medical past an insurer can reach into when it does assess you, the honest limits are in what a UK insurer can and cannot search about your prescriptions.

If you have read this far and realised you do not yet have cover that fits a life split between two countries, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker put the residence and travel questionnaire in front of the right insurers from the start, rather than applying blind and being surprised by an exclusion.

Scotland, Northern Ireland and the property abroad

The underwriting rules here do not vary within the UK. The duty to take reasonable care answering an insurer's questions comes from consumer insurance law that applies in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland alike, so a Scottish or Northern Irish applicant faces the same foreign travel questionnaire and the same approach to destinations.

What does differ is what happens to an overseas property if you die. A second home abroad usually falls under the succession law of the country it sits in, not UK law, and that can pull against your UK will in ways that catch families out — forced heirship rules in parts of Europe are the classic example. Scotland and Northern Ireland also handle succession to your UK estate differently from England and Wales. None of that changes your life cover, but it changes who ends up with the foreign home and how smoothly, which is worth planning alongside the policy. The same "who inherits what, and who keeps paying for it" problem, in a property context, is set out in our guide to a landlord dying with a portfolio and months of payments to find, and the broader picture sits in the hub on getting cover with a history, a condition or a job.

Frequently asked questions

Does spending half the year abroad affect my application?

It can. Insurers ask where you go, how long you stay, how often and why. Time in most of western Europe, North America and Australasia generally makes little difference. Extended stays in countries with limited healthcare, conflict or a high disease burden are treated more carefully, and it is the destination rather than the amount of travel that usually drives the decision.

What is in the foreign travel questionnaire?

Usually the countries visited, the regions within them, how many weeks a year you spend there, the purpose of the travel, where you stay, whether you undertake hazardous activities while away, and whether you hold or intend to hold residence anywhere other than the UK. It is a routine document, not a test, and answering it precisely is what lets the underwriter price the risk fairly.

Can a destination be excluded rather than rated?

Yes. Insurers sometimes apply a territorial exclusion for a named country or region instead of charging extra, particularly where the concern is conflict or a specific hazard. Read the wording carefully, since an exclusion covering routine travel to the very place you spend half the year may leave you without the protection you were trying to buy.