Best contents insurance 2026

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 72 contents insurance policies from dozens of providers. Here, we reveal our scores and our Best Buy policies.

• Want combined contents and buildings insurance? Go to our best home insurance page.

Please note that this article is for information purposes only and doesn't constitute advice. Please refer to the insurer's T&Cs before committing to any financial products.

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.

Best UK contents insurance policies 2026

What does contents insurance cover?

As a general rule, 'contents' are the items you'd 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, microwave and kettle
• 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 policies:

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 accounts for 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 contents insurance is well worth considering for most people. However, the obvious drawback is that it costs money, so think about your specific needs.

Try to estimate the combined value of your possessions (various online calculators can help). 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. Many policies, for example, include student cover, which covers a member of a household even while they're temporarily living away from home 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 possessions carried while out and about (personal possessions cover), others will be satisfied with more basic cover. Most policies have optional features you can add or tweak to meet 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 essentially putting money into a savings account for the purpose of repairing or replacing your belongings. 

Doing so properly means thinking carefully about the combined value of what you own and setting aside money regularly in dedicated savings to build up your reserve quickly.

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 can cost tens of thousands of pounds in damage. 

'Make sure your policy fits you'

Dean Sobers, Which? insurance expert, says: 

Many people think that most insurance policies offer similar levels of cover.  

Our latest analysis shows this simply isn't true: we rated 72 contents policies and the scores ranged from 52% to 88%. But while our scores rate overall levels of cover, the detail is where you could get caught out.  

One in 10 of the policies we analysed don't cover theft of contents from the open (for example, on the grounds of your property rather than inside your home), most won't cover damage to your contents caused by your pets, and a quarter won't cover guests' belongings.

Surprisingly, one rare area of consensus was cover for the contents of your freezer, which all but one of the 72 policies offered some level of cover for.

Policy variations are defensible. Different customers can have very different requirements. But it means you can't assume that insurers or their policies are all much of a muchness. Check the T&Cs before purchasing your policy to make sure everything you consider important is covered.

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 June and July 2026, we surveyed 30 insurance companies about the levels of cover in their policies. We rated 81 elements of contents cover, and 55 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.

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 (though you can see which home insurers customers also rated highly in our best home insurance guide). However, we withhold Best Buys from providers 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 70%.

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).