What your contents insurance doesn't cover on moving day

There is a day, usually about eight hours long, when everything you own is in a van on the North Circular and is covered by neither of the two insurance policies you assumed were covering it.

Most people discover this after something breaks.

The gap, in one paragraph

Your home contents policy insures your belongings in your home. Once they are in a van, most standard policies stop applying, or apply only under a limited "removal of contents" clause that many insurers require you to notify them about in advance.

Your remover's insurance is goods-in-transit cover. It is real, but it is not full replacement cover for everything you own. It typically carries a per-item limit, often excludes items you packed yourself, and frequently excludes categories — jewellery, cash, documents, sometimes electronics — outright.

Between those two sits the gap. The gap is exactly the length of the move.

Owner-packed boxes

This is the clause that surprises most people. Many removal firms will not cover the contents of a box the customer packed, because they cannot verify what went into it or how well.

The practical implication is not "let them pack everything" — that costs more and is not always necessary. It is that the things you most care about should either be packed by the remover or carried by you personally. A laptop in a self-packed box is, for insurance purposes, often on its own.

The per-item limit

Goods-in-transit cover is usually written with a total limit and a much lower per-item limit. That is fine for a sofa and useless for the three things in your home that are genuinely expensive.

Work out which items in your home would actually hurt to lose — the laptop, the bike, the instrument, the ring — and check each against the per-item figure specifically. If any exceed it, either declare them separately, insure them separately, or put them in your own car.

What to do about it

Notify your existing insurer. Some policies extend to cover a move if you tell them beforehand. This is free and takes one phone call, and doing it afterwards is worth nothing.

Check the overlap between properties. There is often a window where the old address is empty and the new one is not yet yours. Ask both insurers which address is covered on which date. An empty property is also usually subject to unoccupancy conditions, which can void cover after a set number of days.

Review the policy at the same time, since you have to change the address anyway. A move is the one moment the address on a contents policy has to change, which makes it the natural point to check whether the cover still fits — the sum insured, the accidental damage option, whether bikes and laptops are covered away from home. Comparing contents cover at that point is easier than doing it cold, because you already have the inventory in your head from packing.

Photograph everything valuable before it goes in a box. Timestamped photos are what turn a claim from an argument into a form. This applies equally to the property itself — photograph the condition of both places on the day, which is also what protects your deposit.

Why the premium changes when you move

Contents insurance is priced partly on the postcode — insurers rate the address for burglary and theft risk, which is why the identical policy on the identical belongings costs differently in different parts of London.

This has two practical consequences. The first is that quoting for the new address before you commit is worth doing, because for some moves the change is material. The second is subtler: the recorded crime figure you can look up is not the figure the insurer uses. Insurers price on claims history for burglary specifically. A borough with a high overall recorded crime rate driven by shoplifting and public-order offences in a town centre is not necessarily a bad burglary risk.

That distinction matters when reading any area's crime figure. Westminster has by far the highest recorded crime rate in London, but almost all of that gap is an artefact of counting offences against a small resident population — we wrote about why that number misleads. Residential outer boroughs like Bexley and Sutton sit at the other end of the table for reasons that are much closer to what a householder would actually mean by "safe".

Pack so the claim never happens

Insurance is the fallback. The primary defence is that the thing does not break.

The failure modes are boringly consistent: boxes packed too heavy so the base gives way, fragile items packed with air around them so they move, framed pictures laid flat in a normal box, and mattresses carried unprotected through a wet doorway. All four are solved with materials that cost very little relative to what they protect.

Our packing supplies page has the checklist, including what to look for in tape and why the free supermarket boxes are a false economy — their bases are not designed to be carried loaded.

And if you would rather the professionals took on the liability, using a firm that packs for you moves the insurance question onto them. Our directory of London removal firms shows which are British Association of Removers members, whose code of practice includes an advance payment guarantee.

The area, separately

Nothing above depends on where you are moving to. But since you are going to be photographing, packing and insuring everything anyway, it is worth being confident about the destination.

Crime, transport, schools and green space for all 33 boroughs are on the borough pages, each ranked against the rest.

Know the area before moving day

One 1-10 score for any London postcode — crime, transport, schools and green space, down to the street.

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