It’s one of the most common assumptions in UK insurance.
The phone costs several hundred pounds, and you assume your home contents insurance covers it. Sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t, and the gap only shows up at the point of claim, which is the worst possible moment to find out.
Here’s how to work out where you actually stand.
Inside The Home, You Are Probably Covered. Partly.
Standard contents insurance covers your belongings in your home against events such as theft, fire and escape of water. A phone sitting on the kitchen worktop is a belonging, so if the house is burgled it’ll usually fall within the policy.
Two things commonly reduce that cover to less than people expect. The first is accidental damage, which is frequently an optional extra rather than part of the standard policy. For example, dropping a phone on a tiled floor is accidental damage, not theft or fire, so a basic contents policy might not cover it at all.
The second is the single item limit. This is because contents policies cap what they’ll pay for any one item unless it’s declared separately and specified on the schedule. Flagship phones have got expensive enough that they can sit close to, or above, that cap on some policies.
Outside The Home Is Where Most Claims Fail
Cover for belongings taken out of the house is usually called personal possessions cover, or sometimes away from home cover, and on many policies it’s an optional add-on rather than something included as standard.
This is the part that catches people out.
Since almost every phone theft and almost every cracked screen happens away from home, on a train, in a pub, on a pavement, in a gym bag, this is the single most important thing to check. If you haven’t got personal possessions cover, your contents policy may well cover a phone stolen during a burglary and nothing else.
The Four Questions To Ask Your Insurer
Rather than reading the whole policy booklet, get your schedule of cover in front of you and answer these:
- Is accidental damage included, or is it an optional extra I haven’t bought?
- Do I have personal possessions cover for items away from the home, and does it apply outside the UK?
- What is the single item limit, and is my phone worth more than that?
- What is the excess, and how does it compare with the cost of replacing this particular handset?
That last question is the one that decides whether a claim’s worth making at all. If the excess is a large share of the replacement cost, you’re effectively self-insuring while still paying a premium.
The Hidden Cost Of Claiming On Home Insurance
Even where a phone is genuinely covered, a home insurance claim carries consequences a separate gadget policy doesn’t.
For example, a claim goes on your home insurance record, and claims history is one of the things that shapes what you pay at renewal. Making a claim for an item worth a few hundred pounds can influence the price of insuring an entire house for years afterwards.
Therefore, it’s worth doing that arithmetic before you pick up the phone, or rather, before you pick up somebody else’s phone to make the call.
What About Loss, Rather Than Theft?
Loss and theft are treated as separate things across the whole insurance market, and the distinction matters more than almost any other detail here.
Theft means somebody took it. Loss means you left it somewhere.
Plenty of policies cover the first and specifically exclude the second, and a phone left in a taxi is loss, not theft. If leaving a phone behind is a realistic prospect for you, check whether loss is named in your cover, because assuming it’s included is one of the more expensive mistakes available.
When A Separate Gadget Policy Makes More Sense
Dedicated gadget cover exists because phones live a different life from sofas. They travel, they get dropped, they go in bags with keys, and they’re the item most likely to be taken from a person rather than from a building.
A separate policy also keeps your home insurance record clean, and it’s written around the way phones actually break. Our gadget insurance covers theft, accidental damage, and breakdown. Even better, you can add more than one device to a single policy, and you can pay monthly so you can cancel when you upgrade or change your mind.
To compare properly, pull out your home insurance schedule, answer the four questions above, then check what a mobile phone insurance policy would cost for the same handset. Either way, the important thing is knowing the answer before you need it.