Umbrella Insurance Calculator
Umbrella Insurance Calculator
How much liability coverage your assets and future income actually need.
How much liability coverage your assets and future income actually need.
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Professional Financial Tools
8/25/2026
Brokerage and bank accounts. Retirement accounts are entered separately because they are treated very differently.
ERISA-qualified plans such as a 401(k) have broad federal creditor protection. IRA protection is set by state law and varies widely. Only partly counted below.
A judgment above your coverage can be satisfied by garnishing future wages, so income is exposed even if your balance sheet is thin.
Federal law caps garnishment at 25% of disposable earnings; many states cap it lower. 15% is a middle assumption.
The per-occurrence bodily injury limit on your auto policy. Most umbrella carriers require at least $250,000-$300,000 underneath.
Each of these materially raises the odds of a large liability claim, and carriers price and underwrite for them.
Umbrella policies are sold in $1 million increments, so this rounds up to the next whole million. The floor is $1M because that is the smallest policy sold and because the cost difference between $1M and $2M is typically small relative to the first million. This is an estimate for planning, not an insurance quote. Actual pricing is set by the insurer or, in promulgated-rate states, by the state regulator.
Exposed assets of $425,000 plus $450,000 of future wages at risk ($120,000 x 15% x 25 years). Retirement accounts are counted at only 25% of value — ERISA-qualified plans like a 401(k) have strong federal creditor protection, but IRA protection is set by state law and is not universal, so they are not disregarded entirely.
Your umbrella sits on top of your auto and home liability, and it only pays once the underlying policy is exhausted. The binding number is the LOWER of the two limits ($300,000 auto, $300,000 home), because a claim on the weaker policy is where the gap opens.
This is what a judgment above your current liability limits could reach: your equity, your investments, and your future paycheque. Umbrella coverage is priced per million and is among the cheapest coverage sold, precisely because large claims are rare.
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Open calculatorUmbrella insurance is liability coverage that sits on top of your auto and home policies and only pays once those are exhausted. It is among the cheapest coverage sold per dollar of protection, precisely because the claims it covers are rare and catastrophic rather than frequent and small.
The usual advice — "buy coverage equal to your net worth" — is incomplete in one important way. A judgment above your policy limits can be satisfied by garnishing your future wages, not just by seizing what you own today. Someone with a modest balance sheet and thirty years of earning ahead of them has real exposure that a net-worth rule of thumb misses entirely.
This calculator counts both, subtracts what your existing policies already cover, and rounds to the $1 million increments umbrella is actually sold in.
Everything runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, and there is no signup.
Two modelling choices worth explaining, because they are judgment calls:
Retirement accounts are counted at 25% of value, not 100%. ERISA-qualified plans such as a 401(k) have broad federal creditor protection. IRA protection, however, is set by state law and varies enormously. Counting them fully would overstate your exposure; ignoring them entirely would understate it in states with weak IRA protection.
The underlying coverage subtracted is the LOWER of your auto and home limits, not the sum. A claim arrives through one policy or the other, so the weaker one is where the gap actually opens. If you carry $500,000 on the home and $100,000 on the auto, your real floor is $100,000.
Federal law caps wage garnishment at 25% of disposable earnings and many states cap it lower, which is why the default assumption here is a middle-of-the-road 15%.
This is an estimate for planning, not an insurance quote. Actual pricing is set by the insurer or, in promulgated-rate states, by the state regulator.
You generally cannot buy an umbrella policy on its own. Carriers require minimum underlying liability — commonly $250,000 to $300,000 on both the auto and home policies — before they will write one at all.
If your limits are below that, raising them is the first step, and it usually costs far less than people expect. Liability limits are among the cheapest things on a policy to increase, because most claims never approach them.
Certain exposures raise both your odds of a large claim and the carrier's underwriting scrutiny:
If any of these apply, the calculator raises the target by 25%.
Umbrella policies typically cover more than the underlying policies they sit above:
What it does not cover: your own injuries, damage to your own property, business activities (that needs commercial liability), and intentional acts.
If you want a clearer picture of the assets at stake, run the net worth calculator first and bring the figures back here.