Home insurance

Home insurance protects your property’s structure and contents against loss, theft or damage caused by flooding, fire, storms, subsidence and escaped water. This means you’ll be able to claim repair or replacement costs for most of the following, depending on your policy.

• Furniture, such as sofas, chairs, tables, beds and wardrobes
• Gadgets, such as mobile phones, tablets, cameras and games consoles
• Refrigerated or frozen food that spoils if your fridge or freezer stops working
• Homeware, including kettles toasters, microwaves, pots and pans
• Vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, games and books
• Garden contents, like tools, plants, fencing, sheds, pipes, cables and drains
• Broken windows, doors or locks as a result of theft or vandalism
• The cost of rebuilding your home

You aren’t required by law to have either buildings or contents insurance, but it’s always useful to have protection in case something unexpected happens. If you have a mortgage, your lender might insist you take out buildings insurance for the whole mortgage term – but you can find this from other sources too, including price comparison websites such as MoneySuperMarket.

To calculate how much cover you need from your home insurance policy, you’ll need to account for:

• How much it would cost to rebuild your property from the ground up
• The total value of your home’s contents, and how much it would cost to replace every item

Home insurance can come with a range of extra policies, including:

• Accidental damage: Accidental damage policies cover you against damage resulting from an unintentional one-off accident
• Legal cover: Legal cover as part of home insurance protects you against any legal costs you might face due to property disputes, personal injury or negligence
• Home emergency: Home emergency insurance pays out in the event that your home becomes uninhabitable – for example if your boiler breaks down or your power goes out
• Away-from-home cover: Away-from-home cover insures your contents when you take them out and about
• Jewellery cover: Jewellery cover is one of several policies you can take out to protect expensive items in your home that might not be covered as standard

If you’re a tenant you’ll only need to take out a renters insurance policy – this will let you cover your personal belongings. Your landlord should have their own buildings cover in place, and while they may also have a contents policy this will only apply to items they’ve supplied for the property, such as furniture.

It can be difficult to find cover for homes at risk of flooding, and at the very least your premiums are likely to be higher. However a scheme called Flood Re, put together by the government and the insurance industry, is making it easier for people in flood-risk areas to find affordable cover.

Listed buildings are properties of historical or architectural significance, and you’ll often need to take out a specialised listed building policy as many insurers don’t offer standard cover for these buildings.

Likewise unusual properties, such as buildings made from non-standard materials, also aren’t usually covered by standard policies – so you’ll need to take out specialised cover.

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So how do we make our money? In a nutshell, when you use us to buy a product, we get a reward from the company you’re buying from.

But you might have other questions. Do we provide access to all the companies operating in a given market? Do we have commercial relationships or ownership ties that might make us feature one company above another?

We commit to providing you with clear and informative answers on all points such as this, so we have gathered the relevant information on this page.

We aim to show you home insurance quotes from as many insurance companies as possible, so that you can find the right policy for you.

Unfortunately, we can’t promise to show quotes from every insurance provider, because not all companies want to be included on comparison websites.

We won’t offer you advice or make a recommendation, but we will provide you with all the information you need to help you decide which is the right policy for you.

You can find out more about how we work here.