Does home insurance cover storm and flood damage in the UK?

UK home and buildings policies “usually cover financial loss caused by storm damage” (Financial Ombudsman Service), and flood is handled by separate machinery entirely. No single wind speed settles a disputed storm claim: three questions do, and the third asks about the condition of your roof. Flood risk is priced through Flood Re, a reinsurance scheme your insurer deals with and you never see, and the £250 excess written about everywhere is the one Flood Re charges your insurer, not the one on your policy.

If water is coming in as you read this, the first hour is triage rather than paperwork, and what to do when something breaks has the order to work in. Photograph every room before anything is stripped out. The rest of this page keeps.

The £250 is charged to your insurer, not to you

The £250 you have read about is a number between two companies, not a number on your schedule. Flood Re sits behind your policy rather than beside it: every insurer offering home cover in the UK pays into the scheme, raising £160m a year, and when you buy a policy your insurer “can choose to pass the flood risk element of your policy to us for a fixed price” (Flood Re). On a valid flood claim your insurer pays you and recovers from Flood Re afterwards. The £250 is what the scheme holds back on that recovery. The same page settles who sets your side of it: “Prices, excesses and terms for policies are set by insurers and not Flood Re.”

Your council tax band sets the price of flood risk, and your flood risk does not

What Flood Re charges your insurer to take the risk is fixed by band, and the scheme is explicit that the amount “is tied to your home’s council tax band, not the actual flood risk” (Flood Re). These are the 2026/27 figures, in force from 1 April 2026:

Band (England, Scotland)	Buildings	Contents	Combined
A (Wales A and B, NI 1)	£147	£58	£205
B (Wales C, NI 2)	£147	£58	£205
C (Wales D, NI 3)	£175	£77	£252
D (Wales E, NI 4)	£198	£86	£284
E (Wales F, NI 5)	£235	£117	£352
F (Wales G, NI 6)	£346	£195	£541
G (Wales H, NI 7)	£447	£273	£720
H (Wales I, NI 8)	£1,077	£536	£1,613

Flood Re footnotes these as net premiums (Flood Re). Wales prices bands A and B together, so a Welsh band shares a price with the English letter one step below it: a Welsh C pays the English B price, a Welsh G the English F price. Welsh A and B both pay the English A price. Northern Ireland’s 1 to 8 map straight across.

None of these figures will appear on your renewal. This is the wholesale cost of your flood risk, and its shape explains why insurers compete for houses near water at all: at band D a combined policy’s flood element is ceded for a net £284 whether the house has flooded twice or never.

Qualifying for Flood Re is not the same as getting it

Eligibility is a test the house passes, and the decision that follows is your insurer’s. Of Flood Re’s eight criteria, four catch people out. The house must have been “built before 1st January 2009”, must have a “domestic Council Tax band A to H (or equivalent)”, must be one to three residential units, and the policyholder or their immediate family “must live in the property for some or all of the time (whether or not with others) or the property must be unoccupied” (Flood Re). That “or equivalent” is doing work: Northern Ireland’s 1 to 8 and the Welsh band I are inside the scheme. So is a house built before 2009 and since “demolished and rebuilt”, which keeps its eligibility, so the date that counts is the original one. A block of more than three flats is one Flood Re “would not expect to fulfil” the criteria for buildings or combined cover, though a tenant’s or leaseholder’s contents can still be ceded from inside one, so long as the policy and the property it covers meet the same eight criteria.

Passing all eight still does not get you the scheme. Flood Re “works behind the scenes”, with “no difference in the way you buy a policy or make a claim”, and whether the scheme sits behind your quote is the insurer’s call: it is “up to them to decide if they’ll offer you a policy and make use of Flood Re for it” (Flood Re). There is no application and no Flood Re policy, and the schedule is not where you would find out. So an unaffordable quote on a flood-risk house is a reason to widen the search, not to conclude you are uninsurable: the next insurer may cede a risk this one declined. Flood Re keeps a list of participating insurers, and a broker is the route when comparison sites stop returning prices.

A disputed storm claim turns on three questions, and the third is about maintenance

No single wind speed settles a UK storm claim, which is why two neighbours can get different answers to the same gale. Some policies name one, and the ombudsman is not bound by it. Where Sweden publishes 21 m/s and the Netherlands windforce 7 as a market-wide figure, the UK tests each claim after the fact. The Financial Ombudsman Service, which settles the disputes, sets the definition wide: “We say that a storm usually involves violent winds, usually with rain, hail or snow. Sometimes there are storms without high winds. Rain, hail or snowfall by itself can constitute a storm.” (Financial Ombudsman Service). The ombudsman checks the wind against the Beaufort scale but notes that “The Beaufort scale is not the only thing we’ll look at.”

When a claim has been refused, three questions decide it:

1. “Do we agree that there was a storm on the date the damage happened?”
2. “Is the damage consistent with what we generally see as storm damage?”
3. “Were storm conditions the main cause of the damage, or did other factors mean the damage might have happened anyway?”

Weather answers the first, and the damage itself answers the second. The third is about your roof, and it is the question the ombudsman’s own illustration turns on: a roof whose owner already knew it was failing. The ombudsman’s published example is a roof that “was already in a bad condition at the time of the storm” and whose owner knew about this, so that “the storm just highlighted an existing problem”. That is not the insurer being awkward. A component already past its condition threshold does not get a fresh start because the weather arrived.

If your claim has already been refused

A refusal is a position, not a verdict, and two of the ombudsman’s rules sit in your favour. The burden of proof runs the other way from what most people assume (Financial Ombudsman Service): “The insurer has to prove that the exclusion applies”, and an inspection report is the ombudsman’s example of what proving it looks like. A storm refusal is also not a refusal under the whole policy, because the ombudsman would “expect your insurer to check all parts of your policy - not just the storm damage part - to see if you’re covered”. Accidental damage is the example it gives of where such a claim can sometimes go instead.

So, in order:

1. Ask the insurer in writing for the report the refusal rests on. If the decline cites wear and tear or gradual damage, that exclusion is theirs to evidence.
2. Ask, in the same letter, which other sections of the policy they assessed the damage under, and name accidental damage among them.
3. Send every dated document you have on the roof: invoices, inspection notes, photographs from before the storm.
4. Use the word “complaint” in the letter. The clock is the business’s time to answer a complaint, not a query: “For most complaints, a business has up to 8 weeks to consider a complaint” (Financial Ombudsman Service).
5. Take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service on either trigger: “If you’re not happy with their response, or you don’t hear from them within the time limits, you can bring your complaint to us.” Its service is free.
6. Watch the date on the final response when it arrives. “You will need to make a complaint to us within 6 months from the date on your final response.” That is the deadline for referring it.

Step 3 is the one whose material you cannot create after the fact. Evidence held against the roof rather than in a drawer is the answer to question three, which is why you would keep a planned maintenance history against each part of the house, the way you would in appkeep.

Build Back Better: £10,000 of resilience work, if you asked before you bought

Up to £10,000 of flood resilience work can ride on top of your repair, if your insurer signed up and you raised it before you bought. The scheme is a Flood Re initiative called Build Back Better, and it “enables householders to install property flood resilience measures up to the value of £10,000 when repairing their properties after a flood” (Flood Re): flood doors, non-return valves on drainage, automatic air bricks, raised meters, sealed entry points. Those keep water out. A second kind changes what happens when it gets in anyway, and of those Flood Re says a family can be back “often in a number of days rather than many months”.

Two gates stand in front of that money. Build Back Better is an insurer-by-insurer decision, so your insurer has to have signed up. Then, asked whether a household receives the full £10,000, Flood Re answers (Flood Re): “Not necessarily – each Insurer sets their own limit. Check with your Insurer to see how much you might be entitled to, and check if any other criteria also apply.” The figure to ask for is your insurer’s, not the scheme’s ceiling.

Flood Re is unambiguous about when to raise it (Flood Re): “If you want your home insurance policy to include BBB speak to your broker or insurer before committing to purchase your policy as each insurance providers offering may differ.” The question belongs in the quote conversation, alongside the excess. Ask after the water has been through and the answer can no longer change what you bought.

The read to do while the weather is calm

Take your schedule and your policy booklet and answer four questions, twenty minutes in total.

1. Find the flood excess and write it down. Check whether it is listed as a separate line from your standard excess, and note that it is not automatically £250.
2. Check the original build date against 1 January 2009, and your band against A to H or its equivalent. A house built before that date and since rebuilt keeps the earlier build date. Failing either puts you outside the scheme; passing both is necessary rather than sufficient, because six more criteria sit behind them, including how many units the building holds and who lives there.
3. Ask your insurer or broker, in writing, whether your policy includes Build Back Better and what limit they set inside the £10,000. Do it at renewal, when the answer can still change what you buy.
4. Find the storm section and read what it excludes. Write the wording down while nothing is wrong, so you are reading it before a claim rather than during one.

Then close the maintenance gaps on the parts the weather reaches first, starting with the roof and the gutters. That is the part of a storm claim you control, and the sooner a gap is closed the less there is to argue about later. Whether a covered claim is worth making at all is a separate question, and the premium arithmetic answers it.

The scheme has a closing date

“Flood Re will remain in place until 2039” (Flood Re), which the same page twice calls the scheme’s planned end. After it the market goes back to pricing houses on their risk rather than their band. That is the long reason to ask about the resilience work above now: the band goes away at the end, and the state of the house does not.

One change lands sooner. From April 2027 the scheme “will more than halve the premium charged to insurers for contents cover in Council Tax Bands A and B, reducing it from £58 to £25”, a change it says is “intended to benefit lower-income households and renters, with insurers expected to pass these savings on to customers”. Expected is the word on the page, so treat it as a reason to compare contents quotes in spring 2027 rather than as a discount you are owed.

Worked example: Imogen in Tewkesbury

Imogen’s house is band D, built in 1974, and sits close enough to the Severn that her renewal quote has doubled over four years. She assumes two things: that her flood excess is £250, the figure attached to Flood Re wherever she has read about it, and that being eligible means the scheme is already working for her.

Her own paperwork disproves the first. Her schedule carries a standard excess of £350 and, on a separate line, a flood excess of £1,000. On her policy a flood claim takes the flood figure in place of the standard one rather than both, which is worth checking on yours: wordings differ, and some apply the higher of the two. On a £14,000 flood repair that gap is money: she receives £13,000, not the £13,750 she had assumed from the £250 figure. The £750 is the gap between the number she had read and the number on her own schedule, and the schedule is where she could have found it. There is no typical figure to quote her here; her number is on her schedule, and yours is on yours.

Her second assumption is incomplete. The house does meet the criteria, so her risk is cedeable, but whether her insurer chose to cede it she cannot see, and the quote that doubled may be from one that did not. Her move is more quotes.

What she had not considered at all is the one with money in it. Her insurer has not mentioned Build Back Better, and nothing in the buying flow would have prompted the question. If it has signed up, her next flood claim can carry resilience work on top of the repair, up to whatever limit it sets inside the £10,000, assessed at the time and hers to accept or decline. If it has not, that is a reason to move at renewal rather than after the next flood. The question takes one email, and only works before she buys.

Related guides

• What home insurance covers in a storm or flood: NL, SE and Finland compared: the two markets that publish a wind-speed threshold and the one that does not, against the UK’s after-the-fact test.
• What a house costs to run for a year in the UK: what closing those maintenance gaps costs.
• Is it worth claiming on home insurance for small damage: the premium arithmetic once cover is confirmed.
• The deductible you choose is mostly a water decision: where a higher excess quietly overrides a cap.

Glossary terms used in this guide

• Glossary: Planned maintenance: the record that answers the ombudsman’s third question before it is asked.