Best contents insurance 2025

What is contents insurance?

Home contents insurance covers the cost of replacing belongings in your home if they're damaged, destroyed or stolen.

You can buy contents insurance as a standalone policy, or as part of a combined home insurance policy with buildings insurance.

We've analysed 75 contents insurance policies from dozens of providers. Here we reveal our scores and Which? Best Buy policies.

• Want the best contents insurance? Check our ratings table below, then go to Confused.com or another comparison site, or direct to the insurer.
• Want the cheapest contents insurance? Go to Confused.com or another comparison site to get a list of policies. Then check what the policies scored by searching our ratings table.
• Want combined contents and buildings insurance? Go to our best home insurance page.

Please note that the information in this article is for information purposes only and does not constitute advice. Please refer to the particular terms and conditions of an insurer before committing to any financial products.

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Best contents insurance policies

You can search for a policy in our table and click on the links to see our full reviews of insurers.

What does contents insurance cover?

As a general rule, your 'contents' are the items you would take with you if you moved home.

These include, but are not limited to:

• furniture: bed, sofa, wardrobe, dining table and chairs
• kitchenware: cutlery, cookware, microwaves and kettles
• entertainment: video games, toys, DVDs and CDs
• soft furnishings: cushions, curtains and bedding
• electricals: TVs, laptops and game consoles
• clothes and jewellery
• ornaments and antiques.

There are three main types of contents insurance policy:

1. Bedroom rated uses the number of bedrooms in your home to calculate the amount of contents cover you get.
2. Sum insured requires you to calculate the amount of contents cover you need.
3. Unlimited sum covers all your contents without any limit, so you don't have to worry about being underinsured.

For all types of home insurance, if you need to make a claim, your provider will settle this on either a 'new-for-old' or 'indemnity' basis.

New-for-old cover means your home insurer will pay for a new product of equivalent value if your insured item is damaged or stolen.

Indemnity cover takes into account wear and tear on the items you claim for, which reduces the amount you'll get. For example, while it may cost £800 to replace your sofa, you might only get £150 if it's 10 years old with rips and stains.

Since the payout on a new-for-old policy tends to be higher, it can be more expensive than an indemnity policy.

Do you need contents insurance?

We think that for most people, contents insurance is well worth considering. However, the obvious drawback is that it costs money – so give some thought to what your specific needs are.

Our contents insurance calculator can help you to work out the combined value of your possessions. All else being equal, it's probably not worth paying for £100,000 of cover if you only need £10,000. But if you underinsure, your insurer may not pay out the full amount you need in a claim.

Check if you're already covered on someone else's policy. Lots of policies, for example, contain student cover, which covers a member of a household even while they're temporarily living away to study.

Check what other cover you have. You may have other forms of insurance protecting some of your possessions, such as gadget cover or mobile phone insurance. 

Whereas some would want comprehensive insurance protecting against accidental damage, urgent repairs (home emergency cover) and cover for the possessions carried while out and about (personal possessions cover), others will be satisfied with more basic cover. Most policies come with optional features that can be added or tweaked to ensure the cover meets your requirements.

• Find out more: Is flooding covered by my home insurance?

Self-insuring

One alternative to owning contents insurance is self-insuring. This is basically putting money into a savings account for repairing or replacing your things. Doing so properly means thinking carefully about the combined value of what you own and putting money aside regularly into dedicated savings to quickly build up your reserve.

If you self-insure, you're effectively taking on the risk that you'd otherwise be paying an insurer to shoulder. You might have enough put aside to replace a damaged computer, but a catastrophic event such as a fire or flood has the potential to cost tens of thousands of pounds in damage. 

Contents insurance calculator 

Before you start looking for contents insurance quotes, you need to work out the value of your belongings. Our contents insurance calculator will help.

Check the policy wording

Dean Sobers, Which? insurance expert, says: 'A reasonably common assertion about home insurance is that cover is much of a muchness between policies – leaving price as the main thing to focus on. But when we analyse the details, again and again we find this assumption to be ill-founded. In this year's analysis, the scores we gave contents policies ranged from 46% to 91%.    

'One of the rarer features that you might have assumed to be a standard contents feature is matching sets cover. This pays to replace a full matching set of items (think, for example, a suite of furniture) if one part is damaged and can't be replaced like-for-like. We also found that most policies exclude damage caused by pets, and some won't cover business equipment.

'You might want a bells-and-whistles policy – or be content covering the basics for the cheapest possible price. But whichever you plump for, the marketing probably won't tell you everything you need to know to make an informed decision. You can use our detailed reviews and scores to help compare, but to become acquainted with your cover there's unfortunately no way around checking the policy wording to confirm that the things you want are present.'

More on contents insurance

How we analyse contents insurance  

Contents score

Our contents score is a measure of how comprehensive each policy's contents cover is.

In July 2024 we surveyed 33 insurance companies about the levels of cover in their policies. We rated 41 elements of contents cover and 25 home insurance features that apply to both contents and buildings cover, such as admin fees. The policy score reflects how well the policy did overall. The higher it is, the more comprehensive the cover.

Certain elements are weighted to have more or less of an impact on the policy score, based on the general level of importance we think they have.

• Find out more: Read our guide on how to buy cheap home insurance

Which? Best Buys

Our Best Buy recommendation recognises the individual products that stood out as being the most comprehensive in our analysis. 

It doesn't reflect customer service (although you can see which home insurers were also rated highly by customers in our best home insurance guide). However, we won't give a provider a Best Buy where there's evidence – either from our surveys or from Financial Conduct Authority data – of poor service or a poorer-than-average record of paying claims.

Policies named as Best Buys for contents cover have a minimum policy score of 68%.

We also look at how consistently good the cover is. To make the cut, a policy needs to have scored at least three out of five points in two thirds of the areas we've rated.

Additionally, all Best Buy contents policies must have – or make available – the following levels of cover as a minimum: 

• Accidental damage cover
• Theft and damage of contents in the open
• Theft and damage of contents from outbuildings
• Business equipment
• Alternative accommodation (£15,000)
• Money in the home (£500)
• Valuables (unspecified single item limit £2,000)
• Personal possessions (unspecified single item limit £1,000)
• Replacement of locks or keys for external doors (£500).