Colonial Penn Rate Chart: What One Unit of Coverage Actually Buys You

What Is a “Unit” of Colonial Penn Coverage?

Most life insurance companies work one way: you pick a coverage amount, like $10,000, and they tell you the monthly price. Colonial Penn’s guaranteed acceptance plan flips that around. You pick a price, and the company tells you the coverage.

That price is $9.95 a month. What you get for it is called a unit.

A unit is not a fixed dollar amount. Colonial Penn sets the value of one unit based on your age, your gender, and the state where you live. In Montana, only age is used, because state law there does not allow gender-based rates.

This is why two people can pay the exact same $9.95 and get very different funeral insurance benefits. A 50-year-old woman gets $2,000 of coverage for one unit. An 85-year-old man gets $418 for that same $9.95.

The price never changes. The coverage does.

If one unit is not enough, you buy more. Each extra unit costs another $9.95 and adds another block of coverage in the same amount. The math is simple multiplication.

Here is how it stacks up for a 65-year-old man, whose unit value is $896:

That last column is the part the television ads leave out. The $9.95 figure is real, but it buys one unit — not a policy most families could use for a funeral.

Two more things are worth knowing before you look at the chart. Your unit value is locked in at the age you sign up, and it never drops later. And this plan has a two-year waiting period, so death from natural causes in the first 24 months pays back your premiums instead of the death benefit.

The Maximum Units You Can Buy (and Why the Cap Matters)

There is a ceiling. You cannot keep adding units forever.

Colonial Penn’s main product page says you can buy up to 25 units. At $9.95 each, that puts the highest possible premium at $248.75 a month.

But the number is not the same everywhere you look. Some Colonial Penn pages, including their $9.95 landing page and their Franklin Madison partner page, say the cap is 15 units — a top premium of $149.25. The range is 1 to 25 units, with a lower cap of 12 units in New York.

The honest answer is that the cap depends on your state and which version of the plan you are offered. You will not know your own limit until you run a quote. It is worth asking the agent directly.

The cap matters more the older you are. Because your unit value shrinks with age, the ceiling on your total coverage drops right along with it.

Here is the most coverage you could reach at the 25-unit maximum, at $248.75 a month:

If your state caps you at 15 units instead of 25, those numbers fall by 40 percent. An 85-year-old man would top out near $6,270 — even while paying $149.25 every month.

For a younger buyer, the cap is rarely the problem. For someone in their late 70s or 80s, the cap can put a typical $10,000 to $15,000 burial insurance goal out of reach at any price this plan offers.

Colonial Penn Rate Chart by Age and Gender

This is the chart Colonial Penn does not put on television. It shows what one $9.95 unit is worth at every age they sell to, split by gender.

Rates as of March 9, 2026.

A few patterns are worth pointing out.

The drop is steady, not sudden. Each year of age shaves roughly $30 to $55 off a man’s unit value between 50 and 80. There is no cliff to fall off, just a slow slide.

Women get more coverage than men at every single age. A 65-year-old woman’s unit is worth $1,258 while a 65-year-old man’s is worth $896 — about 40 percent more for the same money. This reflects longer average life expectancy for women.

The chart also lines up in a useful way. A woman’s unit value at any age roughly matches a man’s value seven years younger. A 57-year-old woman gets $1,669, the same as a 50-year-old man.

After age 80, the male values nearly flatten out. From 80 to 85, a man’s unit only falls from $426 to $418. The company appears to have hit a floor it will not go below.

The final expense coverage from one unit crosses under $1,000 at age 63 for men and age 70 for women. That is the point where a single $9.95 unit stops covering even a direct cremation.

Rates change. These values were pulled from Colonial Penn’s own quote tool in March 2026, and the company adjusts them from time to time. Run a live quote before you rely on any number here.

Unit Values by State: Why Your Quote May Differ

The chart above is a strong estimate. It is not a promise.

Colonial Penn states plainly that unit values are based on three things: your age, your gender, and your state of residence. The published charts only show two of those. The state piece is missing.

The Amounts are approximate and may vary by state.

Colonial Penn does not publish a state-by-state breakdown anywhere public. The only way to see your real number is to enter your state in their quote tool.

We could not confirm how wide the state-to-state spread actually is. No source we found gives a range or a percentage. Treat any claim about that spread with suspicion, including our own — we do not know.

Three state situations we can confirm:

New York is the one that most changes the picture. If you live there, the $9.95 unit plan is not the only Colonial Penn option, and it may not be the better one.

For everyone else, the takeaway is short. Use this chart to understand how the system works and to ballpark your cost. Use a live quote to learn your actual number.

How Much Coverage $9.95 Buys at Every Age

Here is the question the chart answers, put plainly: if you sent Colonial Penn one $9.95 payment a month and nothing more, what would your family actually receive?

The answer is somewhere between $418 and $2,000, depending on who you are.

That range sounds wide until you compare it to what a funeral costs. The National Funeral Directors Association puts the median cost of a funeral with viewing and burial at $8,300. Add a burial vault and it rises to $9,995. A cremation with a viewing runs about $6,280.

This table lines up one unit against that $8,300 benchmark:

No one at any age gets even a quarter of a funeral for $9.95.

At the youngest end, one unit covers a casket and not much else. At 80, one unit is closer to the cost of the death certificates and the flowers.

Even a direct cremation, the cheapest option there is at roughly $2,000, sits above what a single unit pays for everyone in this chart. A 50-year-old woman comes closest and still falls short.

What it takes to reach $10,000

Most people shopping for funeral insurance are aiming at something near $10,000. So the real question is not what one unit buys. It is how many units you need, and what that costs.

These figures round up to the next whole unit, so each row clears $10,000 rather than landing just under it.

Look at the bottom rows. A 75-year-old man needs 19 units. If his state caps him at 15, he cannot get to $10,000 through this plan at any price. At 80, he needs 24 of the 25 units allowed, and he is paying $238.80 every month to get there.

That is $2,865 a year for a $10,000 death benefit. In four years he will have paid in more than a third of what the policy is worth.

One more thing the table cannot show. During the first two years, a death from natural causes pays back your premiums instead of the benefit. So the coverage in these rows is not coverage yet — not until month 25.

Calculating Your Real Cost Per $1,000 of Coverage

Cost per $1,000 is the number that lets you compare any policy to any other policy. It strips out the unit system entirely.

The math is short. Take your monthly premium, divide by your coverage, then multiply by 1,000.

For a 65-year-old man with one unit: $9.95 divided by $896 is 0.0111. Multiply by 1,000 and you get $11.11.

So he pays $11.11 a month for every $1,000 of coverage. Buying more units does not change that number. Ten units cost ten times as much and buy ten times the coverage, so the rate per $1,000 holds steady all the way up.

That is the useful thing about this measure. One unit or twenty-four, your cost per $1,000 is the same. It is a clean way to judge the plan.

Here it is at every fifth age:

A man at 80 pays nearly four times what a man at 50 pays for the same $1,000 of protection. That is the unit system doing exactly what it was built to do, just stated in a way you can act on.

How that compares

A number alone does not tell you if it is good or bad. It needs something to sit next to.

Colonial Penn costs roughly twice as much per $1,000 as the others at 65. And the competitors in that table pay the full benefit from day one.

The pattern holds at other ages too. Using Mutual of Omaha rates, a 50-year-old man pays $3.07 per $1,000 there against $5.96 with Colonial Penn. At 70 it is $7.46 against $14.44. At 80, $13.97 against $23.36.

A 50-year-old woman paying $49.75 monthly at Colonial Penn for $10,000, while Transamerica charges $24.23, and Mutual of Omaha $24.31 for the same coverage.

The number this measure hides

Cost per $1,000 assumes you have $1,000 of coverage. For the first two years of this policy, you do not.

If a 70-year-old man buys 15 units at $149.25 a month and dies of natural causes at month 20, his family gets his premiums back, not $10,335. He paid $2,985 over those 20 months for a refund.

So the honest reading is this. The rates above are what you pay per $1,000 starting in year three. Before that, your real cost per $1,000 of natural-death coverage is not $14.44. It is undefined, because the coverage is not there.

Colonial Penn does cover accidental death in full from day one. But most people do not die by accident.

Does Your Rate Stay the Same While Your Coverage Shrinks?

This is one of the most common worries about the plan, and the answer is reassuring. No, your coverage does not shrink.

Colonial Penn addresses it directly in their own FAQ. Asked whether benefits are reduced as you get older, their answer is no — once your coverage begins, the benefit will not decrease as you age or if your health changes.

The premium is locked too. Once the policy takes effect, your rate stays the same for as long as you keep it.

So a 60-year-old man who buys 9 units today pays $89.55 a month and has $10,503 in final expense insurance. At 75, he still pays $89.55 and still has $10,503. His unit value does not follow the chart down.

The shrinking in that chart happens before you buy, not after. It describes what different people get at different starting ages. It is not a schedule your own policy runs on.

This is normal for whole life insurance, by the way. Level premiums and a level death benefit are standard, and Colonial Penn’s competitors lock both in the same way.

What can actually reduce your benefit

Two things can, and they are worth knowing.

Policy loans. This plan builds cash value, and you can borrow against it. Colonial Penn charges 8% interest, compounded annually. Any loan you have not paid back, plus the interest on it, comes out of the death benefit when you die.

That 8% compounds fast. A $2,000 loan left alone for ten years grows to about $4,318, and that whole amount is subtracted from what your family receives.

Not paying. Coverage stays in force as long as premiums are paid when due. Stop paying and the policy can lapse.

The shrinking that does happen

There is a real way your coverage loses ground over time, and it is not the one people worry about.

Your death benefit is a fixed dollar amount. Funeral costs are not fixed.

The NFDA’s own numbers show the median funeral with burial rising from $7,848 in 2021 to $8,300 in 2023 — up 5.8% in two years. Cremation with a viewing rose 8.1% over the same stretch, from $5,810 to $6,280.

A $10,000 benefit covers a full funeral today. If prices keep climbing at roughly 3% a year, that same $10,000 would have about $5,500 of today’s buying power in twenty years. The number on the policy never changes. What it can pay for does.

That is not a Colonial Penn problem. Every fixed-benefit burial policy works this way. But it is the honest answer to the question this section asks.

Your rate stays the same. Your coverage stays the same. What that coverage buys is the thing that shrinks.