Contents insurance is priced on a number most people guess. The guess is almost always low, and the consequences of guessing low are worse than people expect.
What counts as contents
The usual test: if you turned the house upside down, contents are everything that falls out. Furniture, clothes, electronics, kitchen equipment, carpets, curtains, the lot.
Buildings cover is the structure and the things that would stay put — walls, roof, fitted kitchen, bathroom suite, fixed flooring. If you’re a tenant, contents is usually all you need.
Why underinsuring is worse than it sounds
The intuition is that if you insure for £30,000 and you own £50,000 of stuff, you’re fine as long as you never claim for more than £30,000.
That’s not how it works. Many policies apply a proportional settlement — sometimes called average. If you’re insured for 60% of what you actually own, the insurer may pay 60% of any claim. Including a £2,000 one.
So a burst pipe that ruins your living room, nowhere near your sum insured, still gets settled short. Underinsurance doesn’t only bite on total losses. It quietly reduces everything.
Replacement cost, not what you paid
Value everything at what it would cost to buy new today. Not what you paid for it. Not what you’d get on eBay.
That laptop cost £900 four years ago and is worth £150 second-hand. If your policy is new-for-old, the number that matters is what an equivalent laptop costs now.
Some policies, or some categories within them — clothing is the common one — settle on an indemnity basis instead, meaning wear and tear is deducted. Worth knowing which you have.
The room-by-room walk-through
Twenty minutes with your phone. Go room to room, film everything, open the cupboards and film inside those too. Then add it up honestly.
The things almost everyone forgets:
- Clothes and shoes. Everyone’s biggest blind spot. Count the wardrobe. Count the other wardrobe. It’s rarely under a few thousand pounds and it’s often far more.
- The kitchen. Not the fitted units — the contents. Pans, crockery, glassware, the mixer, the air fryer, the small appliances that accumulate. Replacing a whole kitchen’s worth of equipment from scratch is a genuinely large number.
- Carpets and curtains. Usually contents, not buildings.
[VERIFY] - The garage, shed and loft. Tools, bikes, garden furniture, the mower, camping gear, decorations.
- Books, DVDs, records, board games. Individually trivial, collectively not.
- Kids’ things. Toys, bikes, sports kit, instruments. It compounds fast.
- Freezer contents. Often covered, often forgotten.
Single article limits
This one causes more disputes than the sum insured itself.
Most policies cap the amount payable for any one item — a single article limit. Anything worth more than that has to be specified individually on the policy, by name, or it isn’t fully covered. Engagement rings, watches, a good camera, a bike, a laptop.
There’s also usually an overall valuables limit — a ceiling on the total value of jewellery, watches and similar as a category, regardless of what the whole sum insured is.
Both of these can be perfectly adequate and both can be well below what you own. Find the numbers.
Things that leave the house
Contents cover generally protects things while they’re in the home. A phone stolen in town, a laptop taken from a café, a bike stolen from outside the shops — that’s usually personal possessions cover, which is often an optional extra rather than standard.
Keep a record
Film the walk-through and email it to yourself, so it survives your phone being in the house. Keep receipts for anything significant. If you’re methodical, a spreadsheet with room, item, and replacement cost makes renewal painless and makes a claim much faster.
Nobody enjoys itemising their own belongings from memory in the week after a fire.
Review it once a year
The number goes up. New sofa, new TV, a Christmas, a birthday. A sum insured set when you moved in five years ago is unlikely to still be right, and the drift is always in the same direction.
Set it at what it would genuinely cost to replace everything. It’s the number your claim gets measured against.