Data from the Hargreaves Lansdown savings and resilience barometer shows that although people in their 30s and 40s tend to need the biggest and most robust safety nets, an alarming number of them fall short.
On average, 44 per cent of people have enough life cover to protect their family, but this falls to just 26 per cent of couples with dependent children.
The middle years are when we are likely to have the most people depending on us. Many people have relatively young families at this stage, relying on them to keep the wolf from the door. Some will also have older relatives who need support of one kind or another.
They are also more likely to own a home with a sizeable mortgage, which needs to be paid if something was to happen to them. It means a protection gap can do an awful lot of damage.
Short-term resilience
The HL barometer builds a picture of short-term resilience. It looks at emergency savings, but also at the insurance cover and workplace protections people have in place.
It considers their total assets and life insurance, and then subtracts their debts and the cost of looking after their children to the age of 18, to assess whether they have enough life cover.
It also looks at how long any sick pay or income protection would last if they were ill, and whether they have redundancy cover or critical illness insurance.
Couples with children actually have strong scores for everything but life cover.
Only around a third of people in their 30s have enough life cover, and while that rises to 43 per cent of those in their early 40s, and 47 per cent of those in their late 40s, it still leaves sizeable gaps, with fewer than half of people buying enough cover.
Those gaps are particularly wide where the need is greatest, so that only a quarter of those with children have enough life cover, and only around a third of those with mortgages have enough.
To make matters worse, because the likelihood of having enough cover rises with income, higher earners are doing a fair amount of the heavy lifting.
Only 39 per cent of middle earners have enough cover, which falls to 28 per cent among the second quintile (the second fifth of lowest earners), and rises to 53 per cent among the highest earners.
Insurance cover
The squeezed middle actually fares better when it comes to critical illness cover, with around two in five of those from their mid-30s to their mid-40s buying some form of cover.
