Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance pays a maximum of $500,000, costs $25 a month at that level, and stops 120 days after you leave the service. Those three facts decide most of what follows.
Military cover is unusually generous and unusually specific. It is also the only life insurance a large number of service members will ever hold, which becomes a problem at exactly the moment it ends. This is what the government provides, where the gaps sit, and what the private market does with a military file.
What the military already gives you
Four separate benefits, often confused with each other:
- SGLI — group term life cover, automatic for most active duty. Up to $500,000 in $50,000 increments, at 5 cents per $1,000 per month, plus $1 for traumatic injury protection. At the maximum that is $26 a month all in. Coverage continues free for 120 days after separation, extended up to two years if you are totally disabled. (VA)
- FSGLI — spouse cover up to $100,000, never exceeding your own SGLI amount, and $10,000 per dependent child at no cost until the child turns 18. Civilian spouses of full-time SGLI holders are enrolled automatically; spouses married on or after 2 January 2013 have to be enrolled through the online system. (VA)
- Death gratuity — a $100,000 lump sum paid to the designated survivor, intended to land quickly rather than to replace income. It is not affected by cause of death.
- Survivor Benefit Plan — an annuity paying an eligible beneficiary up to 55% of retired pay, adjusted for inflation, for life. It is a retirement election, not insurance, and it is the one most often left unmade.
Taken together that is a real safety net. It is also, for a married service member with a mortgage and children, frequently not enough — and it disappears on a schedule.
Where the shortfall usually sits
Run the arithmetic rather than accepting the maximum as an answer. A $500,000 death benefit against a $350,000 mortgage, two children who will reach college age, and a surviving spouse who would need income for two decades is not a large cushion. Our page on how much cover you actually need works through the calculation properly.
The other shortfall is the spouse. $100,000 on a partner who provides childcare, and whose death would force the surviving service member into paid care while deployed, tends to be under-scoped.
What underwriters do with a military file
Private carriers do not decline service members. What they do is ask a specific set of questions, and the answers determine both the price and whether an exclusion appears in the contract:
- Your military occupational specialty, and what it involves day to day
- Whether you serve in special operations
- Whether you have deployment orders, or are currently deployed
- Flight status, dive status, explosive ordnance duties
Two patterns are worth knowing before you apply. First, pending deployment orders can pause an application — several carriers will not issue while orders are active, which is precisely when people go looking. Apply before orders come through, not after.
Second, war and terrorism exclusion clauses vary enormously between carriers. Some have none. Some exclude death caused by declared or undeclared war. Some exclude only while on active duty in a designated combat zone. The clause is in the contract rather than the brochure, and it is the single most important thing to read before signing. An agent who has placed military business will know which carriers write clean and which do not; this is a case where carrier selection matters more than price.
PTSD and the mental health question
A PTSD diagnosis is underwritten, not rejected. What carriers look at is broadly the same list they apply to any mental health history: how long since diagnosis, whether treatment is current and stable, whether there has been any hospitalisation, whether there is any history of self-harm, and whether substance use appears alongside it.
Stable, treated, several years out, with no hospitalisation, is a file that reaches competitive pricing at some carriers. A recent diagnosis with active symptoms is harder, and may draw a postpone rather than a decline. The variation between carriers here is wide enough that a single decline tells you very little — the same reason our page on applying after a decline exists.
A VA disability rating on its own is not an underwriting problem. What the rating is for is the question.
The 120-day cliff, and the conversion window
This is the part that costs people money, and it is entirely avoidable.
SGLI is not portable. It ends. You get 120 days of free coverage after separation, and then nothing. What replaces it is VGLI — Veterans’ Group Life Insurance — and the deadlines are firm:
- Within 240 days of separation: you can convert with no health questions at all. Any diagnosis, any rating, any history. This is the single most valuable window in military life insurance.
- Between 240 days and 1 year 120 days: you can still apply, but now with a health review.
- After 1 year and 120 days: the window is closed permanently.
VGLI covers $10,000 to $500,000, capped at your SGLI level on separation, and can be increased by $25,000 at one year and every five years after that, up to age 60. (VA)
The trade-off is price. VGLI premiums are age-banded and rise on a schedule, so a healthy 30-year-old veteran will usually find private term cover materially cheaper over a 20-year horizon. The right move for most people leaving service is to apply for private term cover first, get an approval in hand, and hold the VGLI window in reserve — not the other way round. If underwriting goes badly, the no-health-questions window is still open. If it goes well, you keep the better price.
For anyone whose health makes private cover expensive or unobtainable, that window is not a fallback. It is the answer, and missing it is irreversible.
Combining the two
Nothing stops you holding both. A common structure for a separating service member with dependents is VGLI at a modest amount as the guaranteed layer, plus a 20- or 30-year private term policy sized to the mortgage and the children — the same laddering logic set out in term versus whole life.
Whole life has a narrower role here. It fits a permanent need — a special-needs dependent, an estate liability — and rarely works as the main policy.
What to do next
If you are still serving: check your current SGLI election and your FSGLI enrolment, and if you expect deployment orders, start a private application now rather than after they land.
If you are separating: put the 240-day date in a calendar the day you get your separation date. Then apply for private term cover immediately, while the VGLI window is still open behind you. That sequence is worth more than any carrier comparison.
If you have already separated: check whether you are inside 1 year and 120 days. If you are, this is urgent. If you are not, private underwriting is the route, and a no-exam application is usually the fastest way to find out where you stand.