Home Insurance Coverage Estimator

How the cover is estimated

Buildings cover is floor area multiplied by a rebuild cost per square metre, and that rate comes from a table of construction type against age: stone runs from 2,200 for pre-1940 down to 1,500 for post-2000, brick from 1,800 to 1,300, timber from 1,600 to 1,200, and prefabricated from 1,400 to 1,000. An apartment is then multiplied by 0.7, because the external structure is not yours alone to rebuild. Contents cover is a baseline for the number of bedrooms — 20,000 for one, 30,000 for two, 45,000 for three, 55,000 for four, 65,000 for five or more — plus everything you enter in the high-value categories, plus 3,000 if somebody works from home.

Every one of those figures is ours. They are chosen to sit in the region that surveyors and insurers quote in Western Europe, they are not a published index, and they carry no adjustment for your city, your finish level or what construction costs did last year. The most useful thing on the page is not the recommended number, it is the gap: enter what your policy actually covers and the tool subtracts, because the common failure is not choosing the wrong figure but never revisiting a figure chosen years ago.

Four flags fire on thresholds that reflect how policies usually work rather than any particular policy: jewellery over 1,500, bikes over 1,000, art over 2,000, instruments over 2,000. Most standard policies cap what they will pay for a single item somewhere in that range and want anything above it listed separately, so the flag is a prompt to read your schedule. This is an educational estimate and not a quote — no insurer has seen these numbers, nothing here is a policy, and the actual sums insured and the terms that go with them come from a broker or provider licensed where you live.

Every figure above was read out of the code that runs on this page. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published one, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.