Author: Faryal Bhatti, Marketing Manager, Norton Insurance Brokers
Key Takeaways:
- Norton Survey of the year 2026 found 54% estimate their current home insurance is above £50,000, with £50,001 to £70,000 as the most common band. Most content sums insured are set by a quick estimate at purchase and never formally revisited, which leaves the gaps open.
- The average clause in most of the content policies reduce every claim payout proportionally to the degree of underinsurance. A £10,000 theft claim on a policy set at 64% of the true content values pays out £6,363, not £10,000.
- The most commonly missed categories are clothing and footwear, loft and garage contents, and any item worth more than a single article limit which is commonly around £1,500 to £2,500, that has not been seperately declared.
According to the Norton Survey of the Year 2026, which surveyed 550 UK homeowners and insurance customers, 54% of respondents estimate their home contents are worth more than £50,000. The most common answer was the £50,001 to £70,000 band, and one in four put the figure above £90,000.
Set those numbers against how contents cover is actually bought, a figure estimated at the point of purchase, often rounded down, and rarely revisited, and the gap between what households own and what they insure for becomes clear.
It is not the result of people cutting corners on their premium. It is the result of a valuation exercise that skips entire categories, the wardrobe, the loft, the garage, the items individually worth more than the policy’s single-article limit. Underinsurance of this kind is silent until the moment you need to claim.
The question is not whether you have contents insurance. It is whether the sum insured on your policy bears any realistic relationship to what it would cost to replace everything you own at today’s prices.
What does underinsured actually mean for a contents claim?
Most contents policies contain an average clause, a condition that reduces your claim payout in proportion to the degree by which your sum insured falls short of the true replacement value of your contents.
It applies to every claim, not just total losses, and it applies regardless of whether the item you are claiming for was the one that was undervalued.
The arithmetic is unambiguous. Take a household in the survey’s most common band: contents worth £55,000 to replace, insured at £35,000 because that was the estimate made when the policy was first bought.
That household is insured at 63.6% of the true value. A £10,000 theft claim is not paid at £10,000, it is paid at 63.6% of £10,000, leaving £6,363 and a shortfall of £3,637 on a claim where full settlement was expected.
The ABI reported the average UK contents claim at £1,460 in 2025. At a 36% underinsurance rate, that average claim is underpaid by around £525. Across millions of claims, that shortfall is structural, and almost entirely avoidable.
How do you value your home contents accurately?
The only method that works is a room-by-room replacement cost inventory. Not what you paid for things, what it would cost to buy equivalent items new today.
Most insurers offer new-for-old cover, which means the claim is settled at current replacement prices, not depreciated values. Your sum insured needs to match that standard.
The table below shows what most people include in each room’s total, and what most people miss.
