How much Life Cover?

Hi there, apologies if there is a similar thread previously but I couldn't find one. Myself and my wife are in our late 30s and have 3 young kids. We got basic mortgage protection cover when we bought our house. We don't currently have any other life cover and I am keen to get a dual life policy set up. Is there a way of calculating a good amount of cover?
For context, we are lucky to have a very small mortgage but we both also have relatively small private pension funds (no employer contributions) and a combined salary of 65k as my wife has taken some unpaid leave for childcare reasons. Any advice would be much appreciated.

You need to sit down and work out how your finances would look if one of you or both of you died

Start by taking into account the income that is lost eg salary and the new sources of income eg widow's/widower's pension

Then look at your costs that disappear eg travel expenses to work and others that might be needed eg child care

Multiply by the number of years for example until the kids are adults, or until retirement

This will give you a start

Are you in your 'forever' home or do you think you will be trading up in the future?

If you go to trade up say in 10 years, health issues may have accumulated and mortgage protection cover may be more difficult to obtain \ expensive.
So if you are thinking about life cover that's something to keep in mind i.e. that the policy could be used for that purpose in future & also would allow you to cancel your current mortgage protection policy.

Think about what costs you might need in the event of the death of either one of you & base it on that.
For example if your spouse is minding children fulltime and passed away there would be additional childcare costs. If its likely your spouse will go back to work there would also be an income loss.
But if the main breadwinner passed away the overall income would be hit. So fair to say that in that particular circumstance at minimum their income would need to be matched.

At that age chances are you need to look at your circumstances again in about 15 years and adjust based on your needs then. Unless you get a very good cheap deal when you are young you need to balance out the cost of insurance against the actual risk.