Close on a house and the mail starts. Official-looking envelopes with your lender's name and your loan amount printed on them, offering mortgage protection insurance. It's a real product and it isn't a scam. For most healthy buyers it's also the more expensive way to solve the problem.
What's usually inside those envelopes is decreasing term life insurance. That means the death benefit starts near your loan balance and steps down as you pay the mortgage off. By year eighteen the coverage is a fraction of what it was in year one. The premium usually doesn't step down with it. You pay a level amount for a benefit that shrinks every month.
A level term policy does the opposite. Buy $400,000 of thirty-year term and it's $400,000 in year one and $400,000 in year twenty-nine. As the mortgage gets paid down, the gap between the death benefit and the loan balance grows. That gap is money for everything else the family is going to need. Same premium the whole way through.
The other real difference is who gets paid. Mortgage protection is often written so the money goes to the lender. A personal term policy pays your spouse, and your spouse decides what to do with it. She can clear the mortgage, or keep a low rate and put the money to work somewhere else, or sell the house and move. That decision belongs with the family rather than with the loan servicer.
Now the fair case for mortgage protection, because it has one. Most of these policies are simplified issue, which means a short health questionnaire, no medical exam, no records pulled from your doctor, and an answer in days. If your health history makes a fully underwritten policy expensive or impossible, that's a real door, and a shrinking benefit matters a lot less than getting covered at all. It's also fast, which counts for something when you've just taken on a $400,000 debt with nothing in place. Buy it, then shop properly once you're insured.
For everybody else, price both. Get a quote on level term for the mortgage balance plus whatever else the household needs replaced. Set that against the mortgage protection premium, for a benefit that only covers the loan and only covers it fully on day one. What term runs is in what term life insurance actually costs, and the sizing question underneath it is in what a free needs analysis actually is.
Check what you already have before you buy any of it. Group coverage at work often runs one or two times your salary, and it doesn't follow you out the door, which is the point of the life insurance you get through work is a perk, not a plan.
One last thing to ask about. A term policy with a conversion provision lets you trade it for permanent coverage later, at the health rating you have today, with no new exam. Decreasing term sold as mortgage protection often has no conversion right at all. Ask about that provision by name before you sign, because it's the one feature you can't add back afterward.