On a participating whole life policy, the dividend eventually gets big enough to cover the premium. Carriers will show you the year that happens on an illustration, and the industry calls it the premium offset point. Once you get there you can stop writing checks, and the policy pays for itself.
Two mechanisms get you there, and they aren't the same. The first applies the dividend straight to the premium, which is one of the standard dividend options. The second surrenders paid-up additions to pay the premium. Paid-up additions are small chunks of extra coverage your dividends bought in earlier years, so this version spends something you already own. A lot of offset arrangements use both, and the illustration should say which. Ask, because one of them redirects income from an asset and the other one sells off the asset.
The offset year is a projection at today's dividend scale, and that's the whole risk. The dividend scale is the rate the carrier is paying right now, and it isn't guaranteed. If the scale drops, the dividend drops, and the offset year moves further out. A policy projected to offset in year twelve at a 6.0% scale might not offset until year sixteen at 5.0%. If you already stopped paying, the premium comes back. You either resume it, or the policy starts selling off paid-up additions faster than planned to cover it. None of this is hypothetical. The vanishing premium lawsuits of the 1990s were exactly this. Policies were sold on a projected offset year, dividend scales fell through the eighties and nineties, and premiums reappeared on people who had been told they were finished.
So ask for two illustrations before you rely on an offset year. One at the current scale, and one at a scale a full percentage point lower. The distance between the two offset years tells you how much cushion is in the plan. If it's four or five years of drift, treat the offset as a possibility rather than a date on the calendar.
The bigger issue, for anybody using a policy as a source of money, is what offsetting costs you in growth. Dividends that pay the premium are dividends that aren't buying more paid-up additions, and those additions are what compound your cash value and your death benefit. Turn the offset on in year twelve and the growth curve flattens from year twelve forward. For a policy built to be borrowed against for the next thirty years, that's usually the wrong trade, and I wouldn't take it just because the illustration says I'm allowed to.
Where offsetting does make sense is when the premium has genuinely become a problem. Retirement, a business sold, an income that dropped. Then it's a feature and a good one, because it keeps the policy alive without a surrender. It also beats the moves people reach for first, which are in what happens if you stop paying premiums and non-forfeiture options.
One detail people miss. Offsetting isn't permanent and it isn't a one-way door. You can turn it off and start paying premium again, and resuming puts those additions back to work. So if your income comes back after a lean stretch, call the carrier and start paying again. Nobody is going to remind you. Dividends aren't guaranteed. The offset year on any illustration is a projection built on today's numbers. Where the dividend comes from in the first place is in what a whole life dividend actually is.