Editorial and methodology policy

Our editorial principles

1. Show the workings. Every plan page states the calibration point and the discount rate used to price it. If you disagree with an assumption, you can see it and judge it.
2. Separate guaranteed from projected. Bonus is never presented as a promise. Every maturity result breaks out the guaranteed sum assured from the reversionary bonus and Final Additional Bonus.
3. Say when a product is poor value. We have no commercial interest in any plan. Where the arithmetic says return-of-premium term cover is expensive, or that a headline "8% income" is not an 8% return, we say so.
4. Advertising never touches content. There is no advertising on the site today. If there is, no advertiser will see a page before it is published, and no plan will be ranked or described differently because of it.
5. Correct errors in public. When we get something wrong we fix it and note it on the page.

How the premium model works

Most LIC calculators online run one endowment formula behind every page. We do not, because the plans genuinely differ. The engine here works in four steps.

Step 1: build the cash-flow schedule

For a given age, term, premium paying term and sum assured, we construct the plan's actual schedule of payments per ₹1,000 of sum assured: the death benefit in every policy year (including accrued bonus or guaranteed additions and LIC's "higher of 7 times annualised premium / 105% of premiums paid" floor), every survival payout at the year it falls due, and the maturity value. A money back plan gets its real payout years. Jeevan Anand gets the whole-life cover that continues after maturity. Jeevan Umang gets fifty years of 8% survival benefit.

Step 2: discount it on a mortality basis

Each year's cash flow is weighted by the probability of the life reaching it and discounted for time. Mortality comes from a single table shared across the site, indicative of the LIC (2012-14) Ultimate table used for pricing in India, graduated forward beyond age 70 for the whole-life and annuity plans. Some plans scale that table: medically underwritten term buyers experience materially lighter mortality than the population, and pricing them off the population table would overstate their premium substantially.

Step 3: calibrate to a reference premium

This is the step that makes the numbers useful. For each plan we fix a reference premium at a specific age, term and premium paying term, then solve — by bisection — for the discount rate at which our model reproduces it exactly. Every other combination of age and term is priced on that same calibrated basis, so the shape of the curve is actuarially consistent while the level is pinned to a single checkable number.

Choosing that reference well is the part that decides whether the whole plan is right, so it is constrained twice. It has to sit in the range of LIC's published tabular rates for the plan, and the benefits it funds have to imply a policyholder return LIC actually delivers — around 5.5% for the participating endowment and money back plans, near 4.8% for the non-participating guaranteed-addition plans, and about 6% for single premium contracts. Those two constraints agree when the reference is right and diverge loudly when it is not, which is how we catch a bad one.

A second script solves, for every plan, the reference premium that would produce its target return and flags any plan that has drifted. Both scripts are in the repository and run against the same engine the calculators use.

Step 4: apply LIC's rebates in LIC's order

The high sum assured rebate is deducted from the rate per thousand first; the mode rebate (2% yearly, 1% half-yearly, nil for quarterly and monthly) is then applied to what remains. Getting that order backwards changes the answer, and some calculators do get it backwards.

Calibration reference table

The anchor point and resulting discount rate for every savings and protection plan on the site. A verification script runs against these on every build and fails if any plan stops reproducing its anchor.

Annuity plans are calibrated the same way, but per option rather than per plan, against published annuity rates per ₹1,000 of purchase price at a reference age. Options that return the purchase price on death are additionally graduated by age: such an annuity is economically close to interest-only, so its pure actuarial rate barely moves with age, while LIC's published scale rises because its loadings are recovered over a shortening annuity term.

Comparing plans across different terms

Wherever we compare plans, the headline comparison is the internal rate of return on your own cash flows — premiums out, survival benefits and maturity in. A return multiple cannot compare a 20-year endowment against a whole-life plan running to age 100: thirteen times your money over seventy years is a far worse deal than twice your money over twenty, and a multiple hides that completely. The rupee totals we show alongside are nominal and not adjusted for inflation, and we say so wherever they appear.

Plan facts, and where to check them

Plan numbers, UINs, entry ages, terms and benefit structures come from LIC's own page for each plan. Every plan page here carries a link straight to it, next to the facts table, so you can check what we say against the source rather than take our word for it.

LIC states the plan number and UIN in the page title for most plans but not all. Where it does, we say we checked them and give the date. Where it does not, we say those two rows are unconfirmed rather than implying otherwise. And where a plan no longer has a live page on licindia.in, there is no link — those plans are described from their policy documentation and should be treated with more caution.

Checking this in September 2026 corrected sixteen facts on this site: eight plan numbers and eight UINs. LIC's page slugs and titles use plan numbers in the 7xx range for several plans widely cited elsewhere as 9xx — New Jeevan Anand is 715 on LIC's own page, not 915. We follow LIC. Our search still finds those plans by either number, because people search for both.

Bonus and guaranteed addition rates

Reversionary bonus rates are taken from LIC's declared valuation for each plan and term band, and are stated on every plan page along with the valuation year. Guaranteed addition schedules for the non-participating plans are taken from the plan's own contractual terms.

Final Additional Bonus follows a term-based scale: nothing below 15 years, then rising steeply — roughly ₹90 per ₹1,000 at 20 years, ₹210 at 25, ₹465 at 30. FAB is not declared per plan in the same public way as reversionary bonus, so this scale is indicative rather than exact, and it is capped for the very long terms that whole-life plans produce.

Projections hold the current declared rate flat for the whole term. That is the convention LIC's own benefit illustrations use, and it is an assumption rather than a forecast. Only the sum assured and contractual guaranteed additions are guaranteed.

Where the surrender value figures come from

The Guaranteed Surrender Value follows LIC's published grid: a percentage of premiums paid excluding the first year's premium, starting at 30% after three years, 50% through years four to seven, rising to 90% in the final two years, with a separate and much lower factor applied to vested bonus.

The Special Surrender Value is modelled on the post-2024 IRDAI basis: the paid-up value of the policy, discounted to the present at a yield close to the current government securities curve. LIC's own SSV factors are discretionary and not published in full, so this figure is more approximate than the GSV. Always ask your servicing branch for a written quotation.

Taxes

Individual life insurance premiums have been exempt from GST since 22 September 2025, so premiums shown on this site carry no GST. Where we describe Section 80C, Section 10(10D) or Section 194DA, we are describing our understanding of current Indian tax law in general terms, not giving tax advice.

What we do not model

• Underwriting loadings for health, occupation, lifestyle or residence
• Rider premiums — accidental death and disability, term assurance, critical illness, premium waiver
• Campaign discounts, staff terms and online purchase rebates
• Policy loans, revival interest, and the effect of an outstanding loan on survival benefits
• Inflation. Every total on the site is nominal, and we say so where it matters

How articles are written and reviewed

Articles are written in-house against the plan configurations that power the calculators, so a figure quoted in a guide comes from the same engine as the calculator it links to. We review each article when the underlying plan parameters change, when LIC declares a new bonus, or when tax law moves. The published and updated dates on each article are real.

We do not accept guest posts, sponsored articles or paid links.

Advertising policy

The site carries no advertising at present. The intention is to fund it that way, and the rules are set in advance: ad slots will be labelled "Advertisement", will reserve their space before load so the page does not shift under you, and will never be styled to resemble editorial content or calculator results. We do not take insurer commissions and no advertiser will have any input into content or rankings.

Corrections

If a figure here disagrees with an official LIC document, send us the plan, age, term, sum assured and both figures at hello@liccalculators.co.in. We treat those reports as the highest-priority input we receive: they are the only way to test the model against reality at scale. Material corrections are noted on the affected page.