When you look for car insurance, you’re asked questions about your car, yourself and your driving history. The insurance company uses this information to work out how big a premium to charge you.
They will ask about your employment status and what you do for a living. The answers you give here can have a significant impact on the cost of your cover.
How does your job affect the cost of car insurance?
What you do as a job definitely affects what you pay for car insurance – but it’s not personal. Insurance companies keep massive amounts of information on claims they’ve paid in the past. By analysing this data, they make predictions about claims they might face in the future.
If particular cars or postcodes feature in a lot of accidents, insurance providers will set their premiums accordingly – and the same applies to job titles. For example, if ‘scaffolder’ comes up in a lot of historic claims information, they’ll charge you more if you’re a scaffolder.
Let’s look at the occupations which tend to attract the lowest premiums – but with the pretty big proviso that job title is only one factor taken into account when a premium is calculated, so there’s no guarantee that you’ll be quoted a similar price to the ones in the table just because you do the job listed.
Every occupation listed below was recorded 200 times or more in car insurance enquiries submitted to MoneySuperMarket between October 2018 and October 2019.
Can you change your job title to save money on your car insurance?
Different job titles trigger different premiums so, not surprisingly, people want to know whether they can change the job title they give to secure a lower premium.
The answer is yes, but there is one huge condition: everything you write in your car insurance application must be the truth. If you provide false information and the truth comes to light when you submit a claim, the insurance company will probably refuse to pay the claim or may not pay it in full – which could leave you in dire financial straits.
You could also leave yourself open to accusations of insurance fraud, which might make it difficult for you to get insurance in the future – or could lead to prosecution.
So while you can check to see whether another job title might be cheaper than the one you normally use, it must still describe what you actually do.
For example, if you call yourself a journalist (£455/year on average), you might find you pay less if you use writer (£380/year), technical author (£340/year) or publisher (£340/year) instead.
A construction worker (£903/year) might find a cheaper price if he or she could legitimately describe themselves as a yard manager (£529/year), stonemason (£606/year) or building contractor (£651/year).
Changing job title
It’s worth point out that you should only change your job title when you’re shopping around for the best deal at renewal – if you make the change ‘mid-term’, while your policy is up and running, you’ll be hit with an administration charge or policy amendment fee of £25 or £50, which could eat into any savings you might otherwise make.
That said, if you actually change your occupation so that you have a genuinely different job title – say you change from being a shop assistant to a delivery driver – you should tell your insurer straight away. Your occupation details on your policy should be accurate at all times.
What if I stop work?
You are likely to pay a different premium if you are no longer working because of retirement, unemployment or because you choose to stop working for another reason.
The statistics show that retired people are involved in fewer claims – perhaps because they are not driving during rush hour – so they tend to pay less.
Unemployed people are often charged higher premiums because they may be driving more in search of work, and possibly because they spend less on vehicle maintenance, which could result in accidents.
In fact, if you’re unemployed, you can expect to pay an average of £848 per year. But if you’re a housewife, it’s just £508 per year – even though your employment circumstances are the same.
Students who also work should provide details as requested when filling in their quotation as well, because they will also find that their premium might be affected by the type of work they do.
Compare car insurance
The easiest way to find the best deal on car insurance is to use MoneySuperMarket to compare providers. All you do is provide us with a little bit of information on you, your car and your situation, and we will show you a range of deals for dozens of insurers.