Is your student's stuff covered by your home insurance at university?
Many parents assume their contents cover follows their child to halls or a shared house. Whether it does depends on the policy wording and, increasingly, on which tier you bought.
Plenty of parents think their home insurance quietly follows their child to university. In my view that belief is one of the more expensive gaps in family cover, because the answer now depends on which version of a policy you happened to buy.
If you have not checked your policy wording since term started, assume your student’s laptop is not covered.
Myth one: contents cover goes wherever the family’s things go.
Sometimes it does. MoneySavingExpert says many home policies cover children’s belongings under a section usually called contents temporarily removed from the home, which can extend to halls or a house share. Many is not all, and the limit matters as much as the cover.
Aviva’s refresh of the Direct Line home range, announced on 9 November, shows how much it can vary within one brand. According to Aviva’s release, contents at university, college or boarding school are not covered on its Silver tier. Gold covers them up to £10,000 and Platinum up to £15,000.
That £10,000 sounds generous until you add up a laptop, a phone, a bike and a term’s worth of clothes, and then remember the single-item limit inside it.
Myth two: if the room is covered, the whole house is covered.
Rarely. MoneySavingExpert says room-only and student policies usually need a lockable door for full theft cover, theft claims normally need signs of forced entry, and things left in a shared kitchen or lounge are unlikely to be insured against theft. A bike in the hallway of a shared house is a classic example of something people assume is protected.
Neither myth is the insurer being sneaky. They are what happens when cover is bought on price and nobody reads the section about where the family’s belongings actually are.
One practical tip: open your policy schedule tonight, find the wording for belongings away from home or at university, and check both the overall limit and the single-item limit against what your student took with them.