---
title: "The Worst Perk At Google"
description: "To cold hard calculators, Google's life insurance \"perk\" stands out as a perk that just costs you money."
canonical: "https://www.coveragecat.com/blog/the-worst-perk-at-google"
last-updated: "2026-08-13"
---

# The Worst Perk At Google

### **Would you pay $500 to place a bet that pays $500,000 if you died this year?** 

Google employees get a life insurance policy "benefit" that pays out 3x salary in the event of death. Unlike many fringe benefits, [the IRS considers this one taxable income](https://www.irs.gov/government-entities/federal-state-local-governments/group-term-life-insurance). It's on a sliding price scale by age, and can't be opted out of. For a Googler in their 20s or 30s, this comes out to around $450/year in additional income, taxed at the marginal rate, costing most employees around $200 a year.
 

So, is it worth it for most folks? Let's calculate the expected value for a median Google employee (a 29 year old male): 

### What you get 1. [Likelihood of death in 1 year = [0.001734%]](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)
2. Multiplied by the total payout ( [median $166k/yr salary](https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engineer/) ) = $500,000 

The insurance's expected value is $867. Or is it? College education correlates with 1/3rd the mortality in the United States ( [Table I-7](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr69/nvsr69-13-tables-508.pdf) ). So let's adjust for that, since most Google employees have had at least some college education. 1. Divided by the 3.5x lower likelihood of death among college educated Americans = $247 

**Total expected value from the insurance: $247** 

### What it costs you 1. The tax cost paid by the employee = $200 (additional tax)
2. Google paid the insurer $450; without the policy, that cash could be directly paid to the employee = $350 (post-tax) 

**Total cost for the insurance: $550** 

**** ![](/cms/images/uploads/img_6091F7A506E2E6BEF_signal20220607183120001png.png) 

 

So now you could either have $550 cash, or an expected value $247 payout from insurance. At Google's roughly 100,000 employees in the United States, that's a net "waste" of $30,000,000 a year. 

### Just buy it yourself 

Even if we aim to be charitable to the insurance’s goals — insulating people from low probability events — the math still doesn't work out. If you're an employee who needs life insurance for money after the unexpected event of your death, I have a much better solution than Google's perk: just go buy it yourself with the $550 extra in your pocket. GEICO will happily sell you a no-medical-exam-needed $500,000 policy for $156/year, leaving you with an extra $394 in cold hard cash to spend on your last year on Earth.