How much does home insurance cost?
Between July and September 2025, the average cost of a combined home insurance policy stood at £384, down £15 year-on-year, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI).
However, what you’ll pay depends on factors including:
- the type of cover you want
- the property’s type, size and construction
- your location
- how much it would cost to rebuild your property or replace your belongings
- history of damage (for example, flooding or subsidence) to the property and claims made in the past
- how the property is used and the security measures in place.
While you can’t (easily) change some of these things, there are simple tips you can follow to minimise the amount you need to pay, without compromising on cover.
1. Start shopping around early
Getting quotes from other providers a month before your current policy ends gives you enough time to shop around and haggle.
Your current insurer will also provide you with a notice of renewal around this time, outlining the full details of your new policy and premium.
Some home insurance providers automatically take a deposit from you ahead of renewal in an attempt to secure your business for another year.
The payment, usually one month’s premium, only applies to pay-monthly customers and is taken from your account a month before renewal. The amount is deducted from next year’s premium if you decide to stay on.
If you know your home insurance policy is coming up for renewal, check if your provider levies pre-renewal deposits to avoid being caught off guard.
2. Know how much cover you need
While everyone should seriously consider contents insurance, buildings insurance is only a necessity if you’re responsible for the condition of the property itself.
A lot of policyholders could be over- or underpaying for their home insurance by incorrectly calculating the value of their building and contents.
When setting the value of the building itself, you need to give the rebuild value (the cost of rebuilding the property from scratch) and not the market value (what it would cost to buy the property if it were for sale).
The market value is usually higher than the rebuild value. However, rising prices in construction materials and labour costs may have driven up the true rebuild value of your property since you initially took out your insurance. For both these reasons, it’s worth reviewing your home’s rebuild price each renewal.
To get an idea of the rebuild value of your building, use the Association of British Insurers’ calculator or a commissioned survey’s valuation.
Meanwhile, be careful not to underinsure your contents in an attempt to get cheap insurance. Consider all the items you have and what it might cost to replace them with new equivalent goods.
Also, think hard before setting a high excess (the amount you have to pay in a claim). This will reduce your premium, but could make it pointless to claim in some situations.
3. Compare quotes and comparison sites
Different comparison sites have slightly different panels of insurers and policies available — and prices can differ. That’s why it makes sense to run quotes on several comparison sites.
The main price comparison sites for insurance are Compare the Market, Confused.com, Go.Compare, MoneySuperMarket and Quotezone.
Although the first time you run quotes on these sites can involve some form filling, your details are then saved, so the next year, all you’ll need to do is a quick review.
Use comparison sites alongside our home insurance policy scores, to check that cheap policies have the cover you need.
Don’t worry about your credit rating being affected, as the quoting process only involves ‘soft searches’ that are not visible to other companies. Only when you apply for policies with monthly payments is a visible ‘hard search’ conducted.
Cashback websites, including Quidco and TopCashback, pay a cash reward when you click through them to buy goods or financial products. They can link to insurers’ websites, but also to comparison sites.
Just make sure the policies aren’t costing more through cashback sites than they would otherwise — a £400 policy with £100 cashback is far from a bargain if you could get the same cover elsewhere for £250.
Many of the best home insurers aren’t on comparison sites
Comparison sites are a great time-saver, but they’re not the whole story.
Which? Recommended Provider NFU Mutual isn’t on comparison sites, and nor are Best Buy policies from Coverbaloo, Direct Line, Ecclesiastical, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Sagic.
It could be worth getting quotes from these providers’ websites, alongside your comparison site quotes.
4. Ditch add-ons (and check for ‘endorsements’)
There’s plenty of optional additional cover for your home, for which you’ll pay extra. Take a critical look at whether you need any of them.
You could have spent years paying for a laptop to be covered outside the home, for instance, without ever taking it out. Or for home emergency cover when you have modern plumbing and an extensive service plan from a utility company.
You may also have opted for bicycle cover a few years ago when taking out the policy, but rarely use the bike.
Finally, when checking a quote, be on your guard for ‘endorsements’.
In insurance, ‘endorsement’ is a term somewhat confusingly used to describe an alteration made to a customer’s terms or cover to reflect their specific case. It should be listed in the policy schedule document.
For example, if you live in a property that was flooded in the past few years, your insurer might add an endorsement excluding flood cover from your policy.
5. Pay annually, if you can afford it
Paying monthly is essentially taking a loan, usually at high interest, from your provider. APR varies, but it can be as much as 30%.
Always check pay-monthly fees and compare the cost against annual cover. You can see which insurers offer monthly payments at no extra cost in our guide to insurers’ fees and charges.
You could spread the cost of an annual premium over 12 months or more by using a 0% purchase credit card.
6. Haggle with your existing provider
If you’re determined to stay with your current provider, you can use cheap home insurance deals elsewhere as leverage when haggling.
When we surveyed Which? members who had renewed their car and home cover in 2022, half of those who’d haggled made savings on their premiums. Home insurance policyholders saved £54, on average, through haggling.
You can boost your chances of being offered a cheap home insurance deal by following our tried-and-tested haggling script.
- ‘I would like to find out why my renewal price has increased.’ Wait for the call handler’s response. It’s likely to justify the price increase.
- ‘I have shopped around on the internet and found much better deals from your competitors than you are currently offering.’ The call handler may ask for examples of cheaper quotes you’ve found. If they don’t offer to beat this quote, you should try pushing harder.
- ‘What’s the lowest rate you can quote me to keep me as a customer? If it’s not much better than this [cheaper quote], I’ll go elsewhere.’ At this point, you should be offered some sort of incentive to stay. It’s up to you to decide whether to accept or switch to another provider.
7. Improve your home security
In the long term, improving home security could help.
Most insurers have a minimum level of security before they accept you as a customer, such as deadlocks on external doors and locks on accessible windows. But going beyond that can get you cheaper quotes:
Cheap home insurance for listed and unusual properties
If your property is heritage listed, has a thatched roof or other unusual feature, you may find you get fewer home insurance quotes, or that the quotes are prohibitively expensive.
An insurance broker may be able to find specialist insurers and save you money.
Use the ‘find insurance’ service offered by British Insurance Brokers’ Association, or call 0370 950 1790.
Which? Money members can also contact the Which? Money guidance team for advice on finding cover.
Cheap home insurance for renters and house shares
If you rent, you’ll only need contents insurance – your landlord should handle the buildings insurance.
While there are specialist short-term insurance policies available and policies covering a single room, we advise being sceptical.
Always compare the premiums and cover levels from renters’ policies with what you could get from more ‘traditional’ contents cover.
If you’re in a house share, all inhabitants will need to be named on the contents policy. It’s important to keep the details accurate and up to date, or you risk the insurer turning down any claims you make.
- Find out more: tenant rights advice