Life Insurance for Motorcycle Riders and Racers in Canada: Riding vs Racing

Racing cars, jumping out of planes, doing anything funky? That is how the hazardous activity question sounds when I read it out on a call, and it is the version of the question that matters for a rider. The insurer is sorting people into two groups: the ones who compete on a motorcycle and the ones who do not. Which group you land in decides whether your file is a plain standard case, a case with an extra premium, a case with an exclusion, or a case that belongs with a no-medical insurer from the start.

This page walks through what counts as racing on a Canadian application, how the insurers I place business with price it, the choice some of them put in writing between a higher premium and an exclusion, and what to do before anything is submitted. If you only ride to work, the first section is probably all you need.

Does Riding a Motorcycle Affect Life Insurance in Canada?

Riding a motorcycle on the road does not, by itself, change what you pay for life insurance on the eight current Canadian applications I checked for this page, because none of them asks whether you own or ride one. They ask whether you have raced. Health, smoking status and your driving record set the price for a rider the same way they do for a driver.

The question I actually care about is how far back each insurer looks. Some ask about the last twelve months. Others ask about the last two years. If a client raced two seasons ago and stopped, the provider asking twelve months gets the application and the one asking twenty-four does not. Same client, same truthful answers, different form. That is routing, not a trick, and it is the single most useful thing a broker does on a file like this.

The driving record is where road riders do get touched. BMO’s motorcycle questionnaire asks about violations and accidents in the last three years, and Sun Life’s field guide keeps anyone with more than two driving infractions in three years out of its preferred classes, with non-standard driving histories priced at a flat extra rather than declined (both subject to current carrier guidelines). A clean licence and a bike in the garage is a standard file. A suspended licence is a different page, and life insurance after a licence suspension covers that one.

So the honest version of the question is not “does riding affect life insurance.” It is “have you done anything an underwriter files under hazardous activities.” If the answer is no, you are not a high-risk life insurance case and you should not be quoted like one. If the answer is yes, keep reading, because the next section is where most riders find out they are closer to the line than they thought. Either way, the general rules for hobbyists keeping their life insurance rates down still apply.

What Counts as Motorcycle Racing on a Life Insurance Application

On a Canadian life insurance application, motorcycle racing means organized competition on a motorcycle. The forms use phrases like “motor vehicle racing”, “motorized vehicle racing” and, in one disability contract, “any contest of motorized speed”, and none of them defines the term any further. The definition arrives one step later, on the questionnaire the insurer sends once you answer yes.

BMO’s motorcycle questionnaire is the clearest list on file of what a Canadian insurer treats as competition. Here is what it asks, and the events it names.

Two other guide wordings matter, because they set the edges of the definition.

Both subject to the current guide and a full review of the file.

What no insurer file on hand answers is the middle ground. Track days with no timing, club lapping, a trials bike in a field, an enduro ridden for the trail and not the clock. The questionnaires ask who sanctions your races and how many you entered, and a track day has no sanctioning body and no entry. That silence is not a loophole and it is not a yes. It is the kind of file I send to an underwriter anonymously before anyone applies, which is covered further down.

The same question on the same form usually lists skydiving, scuba diving and backcountry snowmobiling beside racing, so the rules for life insurance with scuba diving or skydiving and life insurance for snow sports run on the same machinery. If your competition is on four wheels, life insurance for race car drivers is the page for you.

How Insurers Rate Motorcycle Racing: Standard, Flat Extra, Exclusion or Decline

Canadian life insurers rate motorcycle racing one of four ways: standard rates, a flat extra of roughly $2.50 to $15 per $1,000 of coverage per year, an exclusion for death while racing, or a decline, and which one you get depends on the discipline, the speeds, how often you compete, whether you are paid to, and the rest of your file. To be clear, there are options available even with skydiving. It’s just that this relates to cost more than anything. Racing sits in the same drawer as skydiving on every guide I use, so the question is almost never “can I get it” and almost always “at what price, and on which form.”

A flat extra is the part most riders have never seen. It is not a percentage. It is a fixed dollar amount per $1,000 of coverage, added on top of the base premium, and it scales with the face amount. That is why the same rating feels harmless on $100,000 and brutal on $1,000,000. Here is what the published ranges do to a 20-year, $500,000 term policy for a 35-year-old male non-smoker who otherwise qualifies for standard rates, where the standard premium runs from about $30 a month based on current carrier rates.

Where the numbers come from, insurer by insurer. Each range is the insurer’s published guideline for motor vehicle racing, subject to its current guide and a full review of the file.

Bars show the published range per $1,000 of coverage per year. A dashed bar means the insurer publishes the direction but no figure. All outcomes depend on the full application.

Read the chart again and notice the spread. The same amateur motocross file could be standard at one desk and $5 per thousand at the next, because life insurance risk classes are set by each company, not by an industry table, which is also why the right insurer for one Canadian is the wrong one for the next.

So before you accept a rated offer, price it against what a 20-year term normally costs and against the no-medical plans two sections down.

Full Coverage With an Extra Premium vs a Racing Exclusion (Most People Get This Wrong)

On a rated motorcycle racing file two outcomes are common: full coverage with a flat extra added to the premium, or standard rates with a clause that removes coverage for a death while racing. The second option is cheaper for exactly the reason it is dangerous. Understanding questionnaires and where one company may offer an exclusion and the other not, those are the factors that play into finding the right solution.

Subject to each insurer’s current guide and the full file.

Illustrative. Any payment is subject to the full policy wording, the information disclosed on the application and the contract’s provisions. The scope of an exclusion is set by the contract and differs by insurer. Premiums are based on current carrier rates for a standard risk plus a published guideline range, subject to underwriting and change.

Here is the problem with the cheap column. The thing you were worried about when you went looking for life insurance as a racer is the one event the exclusion carves out. You would be paying for a policy that covers you everywhere except the start line, which can suit a rider who does two club events a year and wants the mortgage covered against everything else, and is a bad trade for someone who races most weekends. I have seen the same logic go wrong on health exclusions, where the insurer excludes the exact condition that triggered the client to apply. Exclusions are also one of the quieter reasons life insurance claims get denied, because the family finds the clause after the fact.

So the add-on people assume will backfill a racing exclusion often does not exist for a racer. My default is still not to lead with AD&D. I would rather make sure the client has the right amount of proper life insurance first, and the guide to life insurance riders explains why that rider pays in far fewer situations than people think.

No-Medical Life Insurance if You Race

A motorcycle racer can often get no-medical life insurance in Canada, but the simplified products split three ways: some treat racing in the last two years as a knockout, some accept it and cap the face amount, and at least one application on file does not ask about sports at all. On a simplified application they’re not asking, are you more prone to this? They’re asking, do you have this? Yes or no. For racing that becomes a date question, have you raced in the last two years, do you plan to in the next twelve, and your answer decides which product you land in before an underwriter ever sees the file.

Simplified issue and guaranteed issue are different animals, and racers mostly belong in the first group. Here is how the simplified forms on file treat racing.

Eligibility is taken from the current application forms on file. Prices are based on current carrier rates, illustrative only, subject to underwriting and change, and are shown for applicants who meet each product’s eligibility rules. They are not offers to racing applicants; eligibility is decided on the full application. Exclusion and deferral periods differ by product and travel with the price.

Two more to know about. Humania’s Insurance Without Medical Exam life plans carry no racing question on the application I have on file, though the disability and debt versions exclude any contest of motorized speed, which is the next section. And RBC YourTerm appears in no-medical comparisons at around $30 a month at 35, but it asks the racing question and is assessed like any fully underwritten file, so it is not a way around anything.

When a significant flat extra is expected, I price the fully underwritten offer against every simplified product the racer qualifies for before deciding where to apply. Which route is cheaper depends on the amount, the rest of the health history, product eligibility and the policy terms.

The catch is the ceiling. $500,000 at CPP, $250,000 at Assumption’s Golden Protection. If you need a million, a simplified plan alone will not get you there, and you are back to a fully underwritten policy with the extra premium, or a split across two policies, depending on each carrier’s rules on total coverage. Accelerated underwriting at the fully underwritten carriers skips the fluids on clean files, but the racing question is still on the form. I deal with almost 20 companies, and the simplified ones are the first place I look for a racer under $500,000. The no-medical plans I rank for Canadians are a starting point, and you can run no-medical quotes against the rated number before deciding which door to walk through.

Disability and Critical Illness Insurance for Riders: Where the Exclusions Actually Bite

Disability and critical illness insurance are usually still available to a motorcycle racer in Canada, but the guides I have on file answer racing on those products with standard, exclusion, or decline, and almost never with an extra premium. The flat extra is a life insurance tool. On the living benefits the insurer tends to carve the activity out instead, which matters more than most riders expect, because the injury you are most likely to claim on is the one that gets carved out. I wrote this to a client a while back about a disability policy with a motorsports exclusion: if you are to get hurt while dirt biking then they will not pay out. That is still the plainest way I know to say what an exclusion does.

The same client asked me whether his policy had no exclusions. No policy has no exclusions. His had no aviation exclusion, and the standard policy exclusions still applied. Read the schedule page, not the brochure.

Taken from the current carrier guides on file. Outcomes depend on the full application and the insurer’s current rules. Verify with the insurer or your licensed advisor.

Here is why the critical illness column is less scary than it looks. A CI policy pays a lump sum on diagnosis of a covered condition, usually after a survival period of around 30 days, and most of what it covers has nothing to do with a motorcycle.

So a racer who gets a CI offer with an exclusion is usually still getting most of what they came for. Critical illness and disability insurance cover different events, and the racing exclusion lands harder on the second. If you are weighing whether to add CI at all, here is how I think about whether critical illness insurance is worth it.

Disability insurance replaces income when you cannot work. For a racer the most likely cause of a long absence from work is a racing injury, and that is exactly what the exclusion removes. You are left with coverage for illness and for every accident that happens off the track, which is still worth having, but you should know what you bought.

If you are shopping for income protection, compare disability insurance quotes with the racing answer included from the start, so the exclusion shows up on the quote and not on the claim. The disability insurers I rate for Canadians differ on exactly this point.

That is one reason I usually place the life policy first, then run critical illness quotes across the carriers that are already comfortable with the file.

How a Motorcycle Racing Application Is Routed Before It Is Submitted

A motorcycle racing application is routed by sending an anonymous summary of the file to two or three underwriting desks, waiting for their written answers, and only then deciding which insurer gets the formal application. I’d want to do a preliminary. I wouldn’t blindly send an application. My concern is having a rating show up that I did not expect, so I position the case first and send it to two, three carriers, and let the answers pick the company.

The question I ask before any of that is when you last raced, because the forms do not all look back the same distance. On a recent call I told a rider the motorcycle won’t matter one way or the other, it was the rock climbing that could, and the reason I could say it that fast is that his last race fell outside every window on this list.

Then there is the question of who will even take a prelim. Not everyone.

A trial application is a real application marked as non-binding. As of my last contact with each desk.

So the two or three desks I pick are partly the ones whose guide reads well for your kind of racing, and partly the ones that will answer at all. Two things people get wrong here. A decline at one company is not a decline everywhere, because the guides genuinely differ and the decision itself does not follow you. And checking only two or three carriers is deliberate: blasting a racing profile to fifteen desks produces fifteen answers that all hedge, and burns the goodwill of the underwriters I will need on the next file. Pick the ones whose published posture fits, ask, wait, then apply once, and expect the usual paramedical exam at the carrier you land on, with the racing questionnaire attached to it.

That is the part a rider cannot do alone, and the part going direct to one insurer skips. One company gives you one answer, on your name. A broker who runs the prelims gives you three answers on nobody’s name, and the formal application goes to the one that said yes.

Your Driving Record and Starting to Race After You’re Insured

Taking up racing after your life insurance is issued does not void a term policy that was issued without a racing exclusion, provided the answers on the application were true when you signed it, because Canadian life insurance is assessed at issue and the insurer’s right to contest the policy for a misstatement generally runs out after two years, with fraud as the exception. Check your own contract, because riders and living benefits can carry their own wording. If something was missed and they find out within the first two years, they can contest it. After that it is yours, and the question you answered honestly in 2026 does not get asked again in 2029.

The intent question is where this goes wrong. Most forms ask whether you plan to race in the next twelve months, and “I’ll start once the policy is in force” is not a change of plans later, it is a plan you have today. Answer it yes. What I do is finding the right fit, not falsifying on an application, which we would never do, and the fit for someone about to start racing is a carrier whose guide reads well on it, not a carrier who never finds out.

Your driving record is a separate file from the racing, and the two add up. The racing questionnaires ask about moving violations and licence suspensions in the last three years on their own lines, before any question about the track. A single speeding ticket rarely moves anything. A cluster of tickets or accidents does, and an impaired driving conviction is underwritten on its own scale entirely, with its own waiting periods by carrier, which is why life insurance after a DUI charge is its own guide. A racer with a clean licence is an easier prelim than a casual rider with two suspensions. Underwriters read the road record as a proxy for how you behave when no marshal is watching, fair or not.

Insurability is easiest to lock the day before your life gets more interesting.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you ride, apply like anyone else. If you race, the order matters: when you last raced, which forms look back that far, which two or three desks will answer a prelim, and whether the extra premium, the exclusion, or a no-medical plan is the right trade for your amount. That is a routing problem, not a health problem, and it is the kind of file an independent broker handles every week across life insurance in Canada, with nearly 20 insurers to place it with.

This article is general information for Canadian readers and is not an offer of insurance. Eligibility, ratings, exclusions and premiums are set by each insurer on the full application and are subject to change.