Home insurance in Australia

Direct answer

How do you compare home and contents insurance in Australia? You do not sort renewal emails by the monthly figure. You decide whether you are buying building, contents, or a packaged pair; whether you occupy the place or rent it out; whether the weather events you actually fear are named in the wording; and whether the sum insured would rebuild the house you live in, not the house you bought years ago. Then you force every quote onto those settings and rank the numbers you were actually offered.

This page is general information. It is not a quote, a broker service, or a recommendation of any insurer. Read the disclaimer before you treat any sentence as a decision.

Building, contents, or a pair — choose the layer first

Home products in Australia are usually sold as building cover, contents cover, or a package that combines both. The names on a website are marketing; the Product Disclosure Statement is the product.

Building (sometimes called home or dwelling cover) is typically about the structure and the fixtures that belong to it — walls, roof, built-in kitchen, often some listed outdoor structures — subject to the definition of “building” in that PDS. It is not automatically a promise to replace the sofa, the laptop, or the jewellery in the drawer.

Contents is typically about movable household goods and personal effects at the insured address, again subject to that PDS’s definition, limits and specified-item rules. A renter who buys building cover has usually bought the wrong aisle. An owner-occupier who buys contents only has left the walls uninsured.

A home-and-contents package is still two covers sharing a bill. Bundling can change the premium and the administration. It does not merge the definitions. If you want the contents-only argument in full, use the contents hub. If you let the place to tenants, you need the landlord hub — an owner-occupier wording is the wrong document for loss of rent and many tenant-related events.

If you compare a building-only quote to a packaged quote and call the building-only “cheaper”, you have compared a wall to a house. Start the sheet with a single occupancy and a single layer.

Occupancy, use and the application

Insurers price and pay based on who lives there and what the building does.

• Owner-occupied, rented to tenants, holiday let, vacant pending sale, and “we’re renovating and nobody sleeps here” are different boxes. A cheaper premium that depends on ticking “owner occupied” while a tenant holds the keys is not a comparison win.
• Home office, short-stay guests, and structural alterations are classic misrepresentation traps. If the risk has changed since last year’s answers, the renewal is not a rubber stamp.
• Construction type, roof, security, and whether the property is in a strata scheme change both eligibility and the object being insured. Strata buildings often already have a body-corporate policy for common property; your lot contents and sometimes fixtures still need their own conversation.

Australians now have a duty to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation. Guessing “no” on a renovation or occupancy question to keep a price is how cheap quotes become declined claims. The how to compare method starts with the event and the answers, not the brand tile.

Flood, storm and the weather words that are not synonyms

This is the AIO question people type after a wet week: does home insurance cover flood and storm?

Storm in many Australian building wordings is about rain, hail, wind and related sudden weather — roof damage, water that entered because the storm damaged the building, trees that fell. Exact definitions differ. Gradual leaks, poor maintenance, and water that entered because a window was left open are often treated as something else.

Flood is a different word. A widely used industry definition talks about water that escapes from a natural watercourse or other body of water. Many policies include flood, some offer it as an option, some exclude it, and some exclude it in named postcodes. We will not invent which brands include it this month. That is a live product fact. Your PDS and schedule are the only current answer.

Storm surge, tsunami, actions of the sea, landslide, and seepage can sit in yet another clause. A claim that looks like “the water came in” to a household can be “excluded flood”, “covered storm”, or “wear and tear” to an assessor, depending on the hydrology and the definition.

Line up weather as its own rows on the comparison sheet:

• Is flood included, optional, or excluded?
• Is there a flood sub-limit or a special excess?
• How is storm surge treated?
• What maintenance and wear-and-tear exclusions sit next to the weather chapter?

A cheaper quote that is silent on flood is not cheaper home insurance if the event you fear is a river. Read exclusions with the weather chapter open. Official education lives on MoneySmart’s home insurance page; this site will not paraphrase a definition so loosely that you skip the PDF.

Sum insured is a rebuild figure, not a market price

When a house is a total loss, the PDS and schedule decide whether you are paid a sum insured you nominated, a “total replacement” promise with its own conditions, or some hybrid. Sale price, bank valuation, and rates notice are not rebuild cost. Rebuild cost includes demolition, debris, architecture, council requirements, and the cost of building now — often in a tight trade market after a catastrophe.

Underinsurance is the quiet disaster of this product family. If the sum is too low, some wordings apply an average or co-insurance clause that reduces even a partial claim in proportion. Others simply cap at the figure you wrote. Either way, a cheap premium built on a low sum is a different product. The long version is underinsurance.

Put “sum insured versus a written rebuild estimate” as its own row. Update it after a renovation, a granny flat, solar, or a jump in local build costs — not only when the insurer sends a letter.

Excesses stack — one number is rarely the whole excess

Home excesses are a family: standard or basic excess; a voluntary extra excess used to lower premium; sometimes a separate earthquake, cyclone, or flood excess; sometimes an imposed excess after claims. A quote form that shows one dollar figure may still add another amount for the event you actually have.

Read excess versus premium before you treat a low monthly price as kindness. If you cannot fund the stacked excess from cash the week after a storm, the cheap premium is an unfunded bet.

Feature checklist (not a league table)

None of those rows has a price in our table. Fill prices from quotes you receive. Our methodology is why this table is a framework and not a ranked list of funds.

Questions to ask before you rank the premiums

Write these in the margin of the sheet. They are more useful than a star rating we will not invent.

1. If a river or creek nearby overflows, is that flood, and is flood on this schedule?
2. If a storm lifts tiles and rain then enters, is that storm — and is there a maintenance argument waiting?
3. What written rebuild figure did I use, and when was it last checked by someone who prices building work?
4. Which excesses apply to weather, and can I fund all of them at once?
5. Are temporary accommodation limits enough for the time a rebuild actually takes in this suburb?
6. Is this an owner-occupier wording while a tenant lives here?
7. What did I already disclose about renovations, a pool, a granny flat, or a home business?
8. If I switch, does the new policy start before the old one ends? See switching insurers.

If two quotes cannot be made to match on those answers, stop calling them comparable.

PDS, exclusions and the documents you actually need

Ask every quote path — insurer site, broker, bank, or a future comparison partner — for the PDS, the policy schedule, and any endorsement. A marketing landing page is not a document.

Search the PDF for “flood”, “storm”, “we will not”, “excess”, “sum insured”, “average”, and “temporary accommodation”. That is literacy, not advice. The PDS guide is the slower walkthrough.

Optional extras — accidental damage, fusion, portable valuables, motor burnout — each have their own triggers. Adding all of them to one quote and none to another makes the premiums incomparable. Decide extras from the event, not from a checkbox binge.

Claims habits that belong in the comparison

Ask how you notify a weather claim, whether an assessor will visit, and what photographs they expect. After a storm, temporary making-safe can matter; so can not discarding damaged items before they are seen. The general map is claims basics.

If a dispute leaves the insurer’s internal process, AFCA is the usual external forum for many general-insurance complaints. That is not a reason to buy a policy; it is a reason to keep documents.

What we will not tell you

We will not name a cheapest home fund. We will not guess a typical premium for a brick veneer in a capital-city postcode. We will not say flood is “usually included” — because wordings and options move, and because “usually” is how people skip the schedule.

For official education, use MoneySmart. For a worksheet, use the quotes checklist. For a placeholder commercial path, use Compare home cover knowing it is a stub, not a live aggregator.

After you buy

Check the schedule the day it arrives: address, occupancy, sum insured, flood status, excess, extras. Diary the cooling-off window if the PDS offers one — waiting periods are a lighter topic on buildings than on health or pet, but start-date and cooling-off clocks still belong on the sheet. If you renovate, start a short-stay listing, or leave the property vacant, treat that as a mid-term conversation, not a footnote for next renewal.

If something was typed wrong to win a price, fix it before you need a claim. Cheap that depends on an inaccurate occupancy answer is not a comparison win.