No — it is not a legal requirement, and a lender cannot force you to buy life insurance as a condition of lending. The one insurance lenders genuinely can and do require is buildings insurance, which protects the property securing their loan; life insurance sits in a different category — strongly recommended by every FCA-regulated adviser, frequently sold at the mortgage desk, but yours to decline. Two honest footnotes to the freedom: individual mortgage offers can occasionally attach specific insurance conditions, so read your particular offer rather than relying on the general rule; and the recommendation exists for a reason that has nothing to do with the lender — if you die mid-mortgage without cover, your family inherits the payments, not just the house, and the average UK mortgage now runs to roughly £290,000 with repayments around £1,473 a month. So the real question isn’t whether the bank requires it (it doesn’t) but whether anyone you love would need the roof more than the lender needs the debt repaid. For sole owners with no dependants, honestly, often not; for households where one income holds the mortgage up, it’s the cheapest important decision in the whole house purchase.

Less than almost anything else in the moving-house budget: a healthy 30-year-old non-smoker typically pays around £8–£12 a month for £250,000 of decreasing cover over 25 years, rising to roughly £15–£25 a month at 40 — and for calibration, Legal & General’s own published averages run £27.95 a month across all life policies and £25.53 for decreasing cover. What moves your number: age at application (the permanent lever — premiums lock at the age you buy, which is why buying alongside the mortgage rather than ‘sometime soon’ quietly saves thousands), smoking (roughly doubles it), health history (loadings or exclusions, with insurer appetite varying enough that whole-market comparison matters), the sum and term, and decreasing versus level (decreasing runs 20–30% cheaper because the insurer’s risk shrinks with your balance). Adding critical illness cover typically doubles or triples the premium — a serious decision with its own honest guide. And one pricing rule above all: fixed premiums over reviewable wherever offered, because reviewable’s periodic increases are the fine print behind most ‘my premium exploded’ stories.

Match the mortgage first, then your ambitions. A repayment mortgage shrinks monthly, so decreasing cover — the sum falling roughly in step with your balance — protects exactly what’s owed at the cheapest price; it’s the purpose-built tool and the right default for most homeowners. An interest-only mortgage never shrinks, so it needs level cover holding the full sum throughout. The deliberate upgrade some families choose: level cover on a repayment mortgage, accepting the higher premium so that a claim in the later years — when the balance is small — leaves a meaningful surplus for the family beyond the debt. And the structure advisers quietly favour for full protection: a combination — decreasing cover sized to the mortgage, plus separate level cover or family income benefit (a monthly payout rather than a lump sum) for the household’s living costs — because clearing the house and feeding the family are different jobs, and one policy sized for the first rarely stretches to the second. The small print worth one question on decreasing policies: they assume an interest rate for their glide path, so confirm the assumed rate covers your mortgage’s, and review cover at every remortgage — the old policy knows nothing about new borrowing.

Almost never through the mortgage desk without comparing first — and this is the single most expensive convenience in the home-buying process. The mechanics: lenders and their in-house advisers typically sell from a limited panel of insurers, priced for convenience at the exact moment you’re too exhausted by conveyancing to shop around; whole-market comparison across the same product routinely undercuts panel pricing, and over a 25-year term the difference compounds into thousands of pounds for identical cover. The buying rules that capture the saving: compare the whole market (the same decreasing term product varies surprisingly between insurers for the same person), disclose your health completely wherever you buy (claims are checked against GP records, and non-disclosure is how families lose payouts), write the policy in trust from day one (a free form that keeps the payout outside probate and inheritance tax, so the money reaches your family in weeks rather than months), and diarise a review at every remortgage or move. None of this requires rejecting your lender’s quote — it requires making them beat the market rather than assuming they have. Two minutes of comparison is the highest-paid work in the entire mortgage process.