Which Insurers Are Most Likely to Reject a Buildings & Contents Claim?

If yours is one of the 2 million home insurance claims submitted in the UK this year, your biggest question is probably—will my claim be accepted or will it be denied? To give you some perspective, around 90% of home insurance claims are successful. This number has been on the rise as consumers become better at understanding what they are covered for, thereby reducing the number of declined claims.

In order to understand how claims data varies by insurer, we gathered data from the Financial Conduct Authority's most recent study on General Insurance value measures. You may want to keep this information in mind when it comes time to choosing a home insurance company, in addition to other factors such as features & benefits, prices, excess, complaints volumes, etc.

Average Buildings and Contents Claims Data

According to FCA data, the average successful buildings & contents claim was around £3,850. These numbers reflect direct pay-outs to policyholders and costs incurred by insurers (e.g., when the insurer pays a tradesman directly to resolve an issue). These are average numbers only—in actual fact, individual claims can fall anywhere from hundreds of pounds up to tens of thousands of pounds, or more.

Around 92% of buildings & contents claims are accepted on average, but this statistic varies from insurer to insurer.

Worst Claims Acceptance Rates: Brit Syndicates, Ageas, Great Lakes, St Andrew's, CIS, Lloyds, Tesco and Zenith have some of the worst rates of the group, with less than 90% of claims accepted.

Best Claims Acceptance Rates: On the other hand, Aviva, Cornish Mutual, Gresham Insurance, Hiscox, The Salvation Army, Royal & Sun Alliance, Liberty, The National Farmers' Union Mutual and Zurich accept the highest proportion of claims, with the last four accepting over 97.5% of buildings & contents claims.

How Have Claims Changed?

The average home claim is nearly £600 higher now than compared to two years ago. The incidence of claims is also higher by nearly 0.5%. Fewer claims are accepted, however, with average home claim acceptance rates dropping a touch from 93% to 92.2%.

Why Are Home Insurance Claims Rejected?

Homeowners can take steps to increase the odds that their claims are not rejected by understanding some of the common exclusions. One of the biggest reasons for denied claims is when damage is caused by wear and tear or a lack of maintenance. Examples of your claim being denied due to wear and tear or lack of maintenance include the following conditions (most of which can result in water entering the structure during a storm):

To help ensure that you can successfully claim on any damage to your home, be sure to keep your home well maintained, with gutters cleaned regularly. Also, if you have specified certain home security devices on your policy, such as a burglar alarm, extra locks or smoke detectors, be sure these are functioning properly and in active use or certain claims (e.g., theft due to burglary) may be rejected.

According to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), 72% of households have some form of contents insurance, with the median expenditure approximately £128 per year; 56% of households bought combined buildings and contents insurance, spending approximately £300 in premiums. Whichever kind of cover you've purchased, make the most out of it by reading through your terms and conditions to find any exclusions, such as those mentioned above, which may render a claim invalid.

Methodology

We gathered the most recently available FCA General Insurance value measures data, published January 2019. We pulled out data for buildings and contents cover, and removed data points for firms that primarily deal in specialist or high worth business, as these values tend to skew the results for the "average" household. From there, we averaged the low and high ends of the data bands to calculate an average, or mid point, across claims frequencies, claims acceptance rates and claim pay outs. See the table below for data on all firms in the FCA study.

FCA General Insurance Value Measures Data

Who Underwrites Your Home Insurance?

To figure out which firm is the underwriter behind your insurance provider, find your provider's name in the following table. Once you identify the underwriting firm, you can use the table above to find their claim statistics.

FAQs