Weight Loss Drugs & Life Insurance 2025

Weight Loss Drugs & Life Insurance 2025

BMI scores are awful and very outdated, but they are often still used as a simple and quick guide to a person’s overall health. This is done in the medical world and the insurance world.

Insurers do ask for a person’s height and weight when you apply for life insurance, critical illness cover and income protection. Some also ask for waist measurement or dress size. What the insurers are trying to do is establish whether your weight might affect how long you live for.

This applies to people with higher BMIs and low BMIs too. In this blog we will take you through how your BMI and also drugs such as ozempic or mounjaro, are viewed by insurers in the UK.

BMI & Life Insurance

Insurers use BMI tables to help them understand if they can insure a person and the price they will charge for life insurance. Having a BMI between 19 and 30 is generally seen as fine by most life insurers in the UK, with many offering standard premiums.

If your BMI is below or above that range, the options for life insurance with mainstream insurers tend to start changing. This is often done by a change to the policy premium, but there are times when life insurance starts to be declined. As a very rough guide, if your BMI is lower than 18 or higher than 40, it’s likely that you will find your options for life insurance starting to reduce.

Your BMI isn’t the only factor that can influence your options for life insurance, your overall health and any medical conditions that you have can change the best insurer for you. We often come across the following medical conditions where people tend to have a higher BMI too:

• Metabolic syndrome
• Polycystic ovary syndrome
• Type 2 diabetes

We know that BMI tables are very outdated and certainly do not account for differences that you might see across different genders and ethnicities. Ultimately they are a guide that helps insurers to make an assumption about a person’s overall health, they’re not perfect but they are easy for insurers to use.

Ozempic and Mounjaro Life Insurance

The use of drugs like ozempic and mounjaro have recently become popular and available to a lot more people. Many GP surgeries now offer private prescription options for these medications and some high street pharmacies are selling them too.

Insurers love data. Everything in insurance revolves around data. They love being able to quantify things like:

• What’s the likelihood of a 32 year old with a BMI of 36 developing diabetes?
• What are the chances that a 48 year old with a BMI of 39 being diagnosed with cancer?

They use decades worth of data to develop statistics to answer these types of questions. These statistics are then used by the insurer to decide what price to charge for life insurance. Unfortunately there are times when a person’s BMI will lead the insurer to decline the application for life insurance.

So, insurers love data and at the moment there isn’t a lot of data surrounding the long term affects of ozempic or mounjaro on the body. Insurers usually use decades worth of statistics to come up with their decisions. We simply don’t have that much information to hand.

Insurers are adapting though as more and more people take these popular weight loss drugs. It’s impossible to say what outcomes you might see when applying for life insurance, each application is so unique, but here are some general tips. 

Firstly, insurers will be interested in whether your higher BMI is linked to a medical condition or not. If it is, then they are probably going to be far more interested in what the medical condition is and your symptoms, than they are the ozempic or mounjaro.

Secondly, insurers will want to know if you are taking ozempic or mounjaro and whilst they might not be asked for by name, most life insurance applications include a broad question about any medications you have taken in the last few months. If there is absolutely nowhere on the insurance application where taking ozempic or mounjaro fits in, double check what’s known as the insurance key features document. It’s likely that the life insurance you are applying for excludes claims for pre-existing conditions, which does mean they will exclude any claim linked to the ozempic or mounjaro for some time.

Lastly, insurers are cautious when there has been fast weightloss. This is because losing a lot of weight quickly can put quite a bit of strain on the body, it can be a sign of a serious medical condition and the weight can sometimes come back when current weight loss methods end. Different insurers will consider your life insurance application in different ways, which is why it’s so important to speak with trained advisers like ourselves who can put you in the right direction.

Key points the insurers will focus on: your BMI now, if you have had significant weight loss recently, any medical conditions that you have.

Income Protection Cover with a Higher BMI

Income protection is really interesting when it comes to BMI. I was at an underwriting conference a few years ago and it was shown how the majority of long-term income protection claims, have a link to a higher BMI.

You will find that insurers decline income protection applications more quickly than life insurance, the higher your BMI is. The risk of claiming on an income protection policy for anyone, regardless of their BMI, is much higher than life insurance. So, if you then bring into the application anything that could increase the chance of you making a claim, the insurers are likely to charge more or say that they can’t offer you the insurance.

When you are taking weight loss drugs like ozempic or mounjaro, it could be that it’s useful to set up your income protection policy now, to then plan and replace it as your weight reduces over time. This should mean that you get cheaper income protection polices in the future.

It’s very tempting to think that you might as well weight until you’re at your goal weight and then set up your income protection insurance. You can absolutely do this. But, it’s often a good idea to set up your income protection cover now to change it later, as you never know what might happen before you reach your goal, that could affect your ability to get income protection.

Options for Critical Illness Cover

Critical illness cover is an amazing policy that pays out a lump sum of money if you diagnosed with a specified condition such as cancer, heart attack or stroke. Unfortunately having a higher BMI can increase the risk of you developing some of the conditions listed under a critical illness contract, which does mean that the price for this insurance can go up more quickly than life insurance options.

You can find that your options for critical illness cover start to reduce once your BMI is in the mid to high 30s, and the choice of insurers become much smaller if your BMI is 40 or over. Taking ozempic or mounjaro can help you to reduce your BMI and over time it is likely that this will mean that you have more insurers to choose from, for your critical illness cover. 

Our award winning advisers arrange life insurance every day and know the best ways to protect you and your loved ones.

Get in touch with us for a no obligation quotation today.

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