PMSBY Calculator with Accident Benefit and Cost to Age 70

What PMSBY Covers, and Why ₹20 Is Not a Typo

Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana is the government accident insurance scheme that costs less than a bus ticket for a full year of cover. The premium is ₹20 a year.

That figure is so small that people assume it must be missing a zero, or that it is out of date, and the confusion is made worse by the many bank pages and articles that still quote the old ₹12. The correct, current premium for the 2025-26 policy year is ₹20, as set out on the Department of Financial Services scheme page, and this calculator uses that figure throughout.

For that ₹20 you get accident cover of up to ₹2,00,000, and this is where most descriptions of the scheme become lazy. PMSBY does not pay a single flat amount.

It pays on a benefit ladder that depends on what the accident causes, and understanding that ladder is the difference between knowing what your family would actually receive and guessing. The calculator above lets you pick a specific accident outcome and shows you exactly which tier it falls into and what it pays.

The word that governs everything here is accident. PMSBY is a personal accident policy, not life insurance and not health insurance. It pays only when death or disability results from an accident, defined by the scheme as a sudden, unforeseen and involuntary event caused by external, visible and violent means.

Death from illness is not covered. Death by suicide is not covered. But death by murder is covered, and so is death or disability from a natural calamity such as a flood or an earthquake, because those are treated as accidental. Knowing this boundary is essential, because it tells you precisely what PMSBY is for and what you still need other insurance to handle.

This accident-only scope is the source of most misunderstanding about the scheme. A subscriber who assumes PMSBY will pay out if they die of a heart attack or cancer will leave their family disappointed at the worst possible moment, because those are illness deaths and fall entirely outside the cover.

Equally, someone who thinks it will reimburse a hospital bill after a fall has misread it, because PMSBY pays only for death and the specific permanent disabilities on its ladder, never for treatment costs. The scheme is narrow by design, and that narrowness is what lets it charge just ₹20. Reading the boundary correctly, accidents in, illness and hospital bills out, is the whole key to using it well and pairing it with the right companion cover.

The cover runs for one policy year, from 1 June to 31 May, and renews automatically each year by auto-debit as long as your linked bank account has the ₹20 balance.

There is no maturity value and nothing returned if you never claim, which is exactly why the premium can be this low. You are buying pure protection against a specific, defined risk, and for the price of a couple of cups of tea a year, that protection is remarkable value for the households the scheme was built to reach.

Put the cost in daily terms and the value becomes obvious.

Twenty rupees a year is under six paise a day, less than you would lose down the back of a sofa in a month, for a cover that could pay your family ₹2 lakh after a fatal road accident. When people hesitate over PMSBY it is almost never the money, it is unfamiliarity with what the scheme does, and once the accident ladder and the tiny premium are laid out plainly, the hesitation tends to disappear.

Who can join and until when

Anyone aged between 18 and 70 with a savings account at a participating bank or post office can enrol.

The upper age matters: cover continues with annual renewal only until you reach 70, at which point it terminates regardless of how long you have paid. This age-70 ceiling is fifteen years higher than the companion life scheme PMJJBY, which stops at 55, and that longer horizon is one of the things the lifetime figure in the calculator is built to show.

The Benefit Ladder: What Each Accident Outcome Actually Pays

This is the detail almost every other page flattens into a single misleading line, and the reason this calculator exists. PMSBY has a three-rung benefit ladder, and the government scheme document sets it out precisely. Getting it right changes what you understand your cover to be worth.

The top rung, ₹2,00,000, pays for accidental death. That is the outcome everyone knows about.

But the same ₹2,00,000 also pays for total disability, and total disability is defined by a specific set of losses: the total and irrecoverable loss of both eyes, or the loss of use of both hands or both feet, or the loss of sight of one eye together with the loss of use of one hand or one foot. Any of those three combinations counts as total disability and pays the full ₹2 lakh, the same as death.

The lower rung, ₹1,00,000, pays for partial disability, defined as the total and irrecoverable loss of sight of one eye, or the loss of use of one hand or one foot.

So a single serious loss pays half of what a double loss or death pays. The calculator lets you select the exact outcome and tells you which rung it lands on, so you are never left guessing whether a particular injury would pay ₹2 lakh, ₹1 lakh, or nothing.

What does not pay is any accidental injury that falls outside these defined losses. A broken leg that heals, a hospital stay after a road accident, loss of income while you recover: none of these trigger a PMSBY payout, because the scheme pays only for death or the specific permanent disabilities on the ladder.

This is not a shortcoming so much as a boundary, and it is precisely why PMSBY is not a substitute for health insurance, which is what pays your hospital bills. PMSBY answers one narrow, catastrophic question: what if an accident kills you or takes your sight or a limb.

It is worth dwelling on why the ladder is built the way it is. The scheme treats death and total disability as equivalent in financial terms because both permanently end a person’s ability to earn.

Someone who loses both hands, or both eyes, or one of each, faces a loss of livelihood as complete as death would bring to their dependants, so the scheme pays the same ₹2 lakh. Partial disability, the loss of a single eye or a single limb, is grievous but usually leaves some earning capacity intact, which is the logic for the lower ₹1 lakh rung. Understanding this reasoning helps you see the ladder not as arbitrary numbers but as a rough map of how severely an accident would strike at a family’s income, which is what any accident cover is ultimately protecting.

How Much Does Lifetime PMSBY Cover Cost to Age 70?

Because the premium is a flat ₹20 with no pro-rata bands and no age loading, the lifetime cost is simple arithmetic, and the calculator draws it as a rising line to age 70. But the simplicity hides a point worth making: over an entire working life, PMSBY costs almost nothing.

Consider a 25-year-old who enrols today and renews every year to age 70. That is 45 years of cover, at ₹20 a year, for a total lifetime premium of ₹900. Nine hundred rupees, spread across forty-five years, for a ₹2 lakh accident cushion the whole time.

A 40-year-old has 30 years to age 70 and would pay ₹600 in total. Even someone joining at 60 pays just ₹200 over their remaining ten years of cover. There is no other formal insurance in India that protects this much for this little across a lifetime.

The flat premium also means there is no penalty for joining later in the sense that private accident policies impose, where premiums rise steeply with age. With PMSBY, a 65-year-old pays the same ₹20 as an 18-year-old.

That flat pricing is part of the scheme’s social design: it is meant to be equally affordable to everyone in the eligible band, not risk-priced like a commercial policy. The only thing age changes is how many years of cover remain before the age-70 cut-off, which is what the lifetime line in the calculator makes visible.

One caution on the lifetime figure: it assumes the premium stays at ₹20, which it may not forever. The premium rose from ₹12 to ₹20 in 2022 after seven years unchanged, and the government could revise it again.

Even so, the scale of the numbers is so small that even a doubling of the premium would leave PMSBY among the cheapest cover in existence. The lifetime projection is best read as an order-of-magnitude guide, a few hundred rupees across a working life, rather than a figure to the rupee, and the calculator keeps the premium editable so it stays accurate if the rate changes.

PMSBY and PMJJBY Together: The Full Jan Suraksha Stack

PMSBY is one half of a pair.

Its companion, Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana or PMJJBY, is the life-insurance half: ₹436 a year for ₹2 lakh of cover on death due to any cause, for ages 18 to 50 with cover to 55. The government promotes the two together under the Jan Suraksha umbrella, and they are designed to be held side by side.

Holding both costs ₹456 a year, which is ₹20 for PMSBY plus ₹436 for PMJJBY. The way their cover combines is worth stating precisely, because it is often described loosely as simply ₹4 lakh, which is only half true.

If you die in an accident, both schemes pay: ₹2 lakh from PMSBY for the accidental death and ₹2 lakh from PMJJBY for the death by any cause, giving your nominee ₹4 lakh in total. But if you die of a non-accidental cause such as illness, only PMJJBY pays, so your nominee receives ₹2 lakh, and PMSBY pays nothing because there was no accident. So the honest figure is up to ₹4 lakh, realised only for accidental death.

This interlock is exactly why the two schemes make sense together rather than either one alone. PMSBY handles the accident risk cheaply and to a later age, PMJJBY handles the any-cause death risk.

The calculator shows you the combined premium and the combined accidental-death figure from the accident side, so you can see the full Jan Suraksha stack for yourself or for your whole household. For ₹456 a year, that combined protection is among the cheapest formal cover available anywhere.

There is one wrinkle worth flagging for older subscribers. Because PMJJBY stops at 55 while PMSBY runs to 70, the combined stack is not available for the full life of the accident cover.

Someone aged 58, for instance, can hold PMSBY but can no longer be in PMJJBY, so their Jan Suraksha protection from that age is accident-only. The calculator’s household mode reflects this by treating each scheme on its own eligibility, so a member past 55 still counts for PMSBY accident cover even though they have aged out of the life scheme. For planning, it means the ₹4 lakh accidental-death figure applies only while both schemes are in force, which for most people is up to age 55.

Three Families, Three Real PMSBY Situations

The scheme reads differently depending on who holds it and why. Here are three real situations costed the way the calculator does it.

Six Practical Tips to Get the Most From PMSBY

Quick Reference: PMSBY at a Glance

How to Enrol in PMSBY and Keep It Active

Enrolment is deliberately simple, because the scheme exists to reach people who find ordinary insurance daunting. There is no medical test, no health declaration and no lengthy proposal form. If you hold a savings account at a participating bank or post office, you already meet the main requirement.

To join, you give consent for the annual auto-debit through a short consent-cum-declaration form, provide Aadhaar for KYC if the branch requires it, and name a nominee.

Most banks now let you enrol entirely inside their mobile app or net banking in under two minutes, ticking a box to activate PMSBY and authorise the ₹20 debit. Once enrolled, the premium is pulled automatically each year, so the cover renews without any further action as long as the account holds the balance.

Keeping the cover alive comes down to one habit: making sure the linked account has at least ₹20 spare when the premium debits, which happens around 25 to 31 May for the policy year that begins on 1 June.

The most common reason cover lapses is not a decision to leave but a failed auto-debit for want of balance, and holders often do not realise until they try to claim. A reminder in the third week of May and a small buffer in the account remove that risk entirely, for a scheme that costs less than a single bus fare a year.

If the debit does fail and cover lapses, you are not shut out. You can rejoin in a later year by paying the premium and re-enabling the mandate, and because accident cover carries no waiting period, protection resumes for the new policy year immediately.

The only exposure is the gap itself: any accident during a lapse is uncovered. Given how little the premium is, letting the cover lapse is rarely worth the risk, and the fix is simply a funded account.

What your family needs to know

An accident claim depends on your family knowing the cover exists and being able to produce the accident documentation. Tell your nominee that you hold PMSBY, which bank account it runs through, and that a claim will need an FIR or panchnama alongside the death or disability certificate.

When the time comes, the nominee lodges the claim at that branch, the bank verifies the enrolment, and the insurer settles. A cover nobody knows about protects nobody, so a short conversation now is part of making the scheme actually work when it is needed most.

PMSBY Compared With a Private Accident Policy

It helps to see PMSBY honestly beside the private personal accident policies it resembles, because the comparison shows both what the scheme does brilliantly and where it deliberately stops.

On price, nothing competes. PMSBY costs ₹20 a year for ₹2 lakh of accident cover, a rate no commercial insurer can match, because the scheme is subsidised in design and stripped to the essentials.

A private personal accident policy offering ₹2 lakh might cost several hundred rupees a year, and while that is still affordable, it is many times the PMSBY premium. For the base layer of accident protection, PMSBY is unbeatable value.

Where private policies pull ahead is in breadth and size. A commercial personal accident plan can offer cover of ₹10 lakh, ₹25 lakh or more, sized to genuinely replace an earner’s income after a disabling accident, whereas PMSBY caps at ₹2 lakh.

Private plans often add benefits PMSBY does not carry at all: a weekly income payment while you recover, cover for temporary total disablement, reimbursement of hospitalisation from an accident, education grants for children, and a wider disability schedule that pays for losses beyond the narrow PMSBY ladder. Those features cost more, but they address exactly the gaps PMSBY leaves.

So the sensible reading, and the one this calculator is built to support, is that PMSBY is the foundation and a private policy is the extension. Take the ₹2 lakh PMSBY cover because at ₹20 it is almost free and pays independently of anything else you hold.

Then, if your income and dependants justify it, add a private accident plan for the larger cover and the recovery benefits PMSBY does not provide. The two are not rivals; PMSBY is the floor that everyone in the eligible band should stand on, and the private policy is the structure some will choose to build above it.

Frequently Asked Questions on PMSBY

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