Hundred SummersRisk reality calculator: the odds before you retire
Before your planned retirement age, what is the chance of being off work for two months or more, of a serious illness, or of dying, and of any one of the three? For you, or for you and a partner together. Built on published UK population data with every source on this page. Your figures never leave your browser.
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Worked example
Computed when this page was built by the same engine that runs the calculator above, so the figures below and the live tool can never disagree. Change any input above to see your own.
| Inputs | |
|---|---|
| Age | 35 |
| Sex at birth | Male |
| Smoker | No |
| Retire at | 67 |
| Results | |
|---|---|
| Off work 2+ months before retirement | 38% |
| Serious illness | 19% |
| Death | 14% |
| Any one of these | 56% |
The next question
How would we cope if I couldn't work? →Income protection calculator
Or answer it with everything else: the full Hundred Summers plan connects your pay, pensions, savings, property, tax and spending year by year, and stress-tests them across 500 simulated market histories.
Read the guide
- Income protection, critical illness or life cover: which risk are you actually insuring? →Three policies, three different events. The population odds of each before retirement, what each policy pays and when, why long absence is the risk most households are least covered for, and how sick pay and savings set the deferred period.
Why the numbers feel high
Each risk is small in any one year: a 35-year-old non-smoker has well under a one-in-a-hundred chance of dying this year. But a plan to retire at 67 has thirty-two of those years in it, and the small chances compound. That is the whole point of the exercise: protection decisions are about the working lifetime, not this year. The three risks map onto the three main kinds of cover (income protection (long absence), critical-illness cover (serious illness), and life cover (death)), and the “any one of these” line is the household question: how likely is it that something interrupts the plan?
Where the rates come from
- Death: ONS National Life Tables (England & Wales, 2020–2022 rates, rounded; the 2022–2024 release shows slightly lower mortality still), the yearly probability of dying at each age by sex. Smokers are set at roughly twice non-smoker mortality at working ages (Doll et al., BMJ 2004); because the population tables already include smokers, non-smokers sit a little below the table and smokers about 1.8× it.
- Serious illness: the age and sex shape of the actuarial profession’s published critical-illness base table (CIBT93), scaled to UK population cancer registrations (Cancer Research UK / ONS) and heart-attack and stroke incidence (British Heart Foundation). Smoking loads these by about half again.
- Two months or more off work: the Department for Work and Pensions’ long-term absence baseline (around 960,000 employees a year begin an absence of four weeks or more, about 3.6% of those employed), with one in three of those spells assumed to pass eight weeks; a 1.2%-a-year base at ages 35–49. Age and sex differences follow ONS Sickness absence in the UK labour market: rates rise steadily with age, and women’s rate runs about 1.3× men’s.
The rates are rounded to five-year age points and interpolated between them. The three risks are combined as if independent, which slightly overstates “any one of these” because a serious illness is itself a common cause of long absence. Insurers’ own calculators use their reinsurers’ claims data for underwritten working lives and come out lower than these population figures; a third either way is the honest range. Related: how much life cover would the gap need, and how long the plan must last on the other side of retirement.