Home insurance in UK flood risk areas: cover and Flood Re

A home insurance policy in the UK normally covers flood as one of its standard perils, alongside fire, storm and escape of water. There is no separate public flood insurance, and no compulsory national scheme of the kind found in France or Spain. That makes the private market the first and main line of cover, and it is why living in a flood risk area mainly shows up in two numbers on a quote: the premium and the excess.

How home insurance for flood risk areas works

When a household asks for a quote, the insurer prices the flood element of the policy using its own model of the address. That model may draw on public data such as the Environment Agency’s National Assessment of Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk (NaFRA), but it does not have to. Section 1.8 of the 2024 assessment states that NaFRA “was not developed or tested for insurance underwriting or setting insurance premiums”, and that insurers may combine NaFRA-derived information with property characteristics, historical claims experience, catastrophe modelling, repair costs and commercial considerations.

That has a practical consequence. The government’s flood risk rating for an area is one input to the quote, not the quote itself. Two insurers can look at the same house and reach different prices, and one may decline to offer flood cover at all.

The scale of the issue is not small. NaFRA 2024 counts 6.3 million properties in England in areas at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water, and estimates the figure could reach around 8 million by mid-century, around one in four properties. Home insurance for flood risk areas is therefore a mainstream market, not a niche one.

Where Flood Re fits in

Flood Re is a reinsurance scheme set up under Part 4 of the Water Act 2014, according to the House of Commons Library, and launched on 4 April 2016. It does not sell policies. Instead, an insurer that has sold a home policy can pass, or “cede”, the flood element of that policy to Flood Re in exchange for a fixed premium. If the home then floods, the insurer handles the claim and Flood Re reimburses it.

The fixed premium depends on the home’s Council Tax band, not on its flood risk. Flood Re’s published table for 2026/27 sets the combined buildings and contents premium at £205 for Band A, £284 for Band D and £1,613 for Band H, net. These are the amounts the insurer pays Flood Re, not the price the customer sees; the customer’s total premium also covers fire, theft, storm and every other peril, plus the insurer’s costs. Flood claims on a ceded policy carry a fixed excess of £250 per claim.

The scheme is paid for partly by the insurers themselves. Every UK home insurer pays an annual levy, which the 2025-26 annual report puts at £160m a year from April 2025. Flood Re estimated about 353,000 policies in the scheme at 31 March 2026, and more than 742,000 properties have been ceded at some point since launch. More detail on the scheme’s finances is on the Flood Re scheme page.

Whether to use Flood Re is the insurer’s decision. Flood Re states that “the decision to make use of the Flood Re Scheme for your policy remains with your insurance provider”. A householder cannot apply to it.

Flood Re eligibility: which homes qualify

According to Flood Re’s eligibility criteria, a home must meet all of these conditions:

• it is held by individuals or their personal representatives;
• the occupant or immediate family lives there, or it is unoccupied;
• it is in domestic Council Tax bands A to H, or the equivalent;
• it is used for private residential purposes;
• it is a single residential unit, or a building of two or three residential units;
• it is insured on an individual basis;
• it was built before 1 January 2009; a home built before that date and later demolished and rebuilt is still eligible;
• it is in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland (the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are not included).

Some property types that people assume are excluded are in fact eligible if they meet those conditions: farmhouses, holiday homes, homes of people who work from home, individual leaseholders, residential buy-to-let properties, and leasehold blocks of three units or fewer where the freeholder lives in one. Tenants’ and leaseholders’ contents can be covered even where the building would not be.

The exclusions, also from Flood Re’s criteria, are blocks of more than three residential flats, B&B premises paying business rates, company houses and flats, contingent buildings policies (for example those held by banks), farm outbuildings, portfolio and commercial-income blocks, multi-use properties under commercial or private ownership, commercial static caravan site owners, and housing association and social housing buildings, whose tenants’ contents remain eligible.

Two exclusions draw the most criticism. Homes built from 2009 onwards are left out, which places the whole burden on planning decisions and developers. Businesses are left out entirely, including small shops that flood in the same street as the homes Flood Re supports.

What affects premiums and excesses

No price can be given for a typical home in a flood risk area, because the market does not publish one. What can be described is the set of factors that move it.

The excess deserves attention. On a ceded policy, Flood Re fixes the flood excess at £250 per claim. On a policy that is not ceded, the insurer sets the flood excess, and in high-risk areas it can be set high enough to change who really carries the risk. A policy with a large flood excess is cover in name for small floods and cover in practice only for large ones.

Resilience measures and Build Back Better

Flooding repairs normally restore a home to its previous state. Build Back Better changes that for participating insurers. Under the scheme, in place since 2022, Flood Re reimburses insurers for resilience measures installed during repair, up to a limit of £10,000, over and above the cost of repairing the flood damage. The claim must be accepted and the policy must be with an insurer that offers it. Flood Re notes that each insurer sets its own limit, so the £10,000 is a ceiling rather than a promise. Its Build Back Better page lists the participating insurers by name, which is the quickest way to find out whether a given policy includes it.

Flood Re’s examples fall into two groups:

• Resistance measures, which aim to keep water out: flood doors and barriers, automatic air bricks, non-return valves on drainage, raised utilities and airbrick covers.
• Recoverability measures, which reduce damage and speed recovery when water does get in: concrete floors instead of timber, waterproof membranes, specialist drainage and sump pumps, hardwood skirting and porcelain tiles.

Surveys to understand the flood risk and how to reduce it are also eligible. The scheme is practical because it uses the moment when a ground floor is already stripped back: replacing a timber floor with concrete costs far less then than in a house nobody needs to repair.

Flood Re’s own annual report for 2025-26 lists inconsistent take-up of resilience measures as a continuing problem. The offer exists; homeowners do not always use it, and insurers do not always present it.

A worked example

Consider a two-bedroom terraced house in Council Tax Band B, built in the 1960s, in a town where the long term flood risk service shows a high surface water risk. The owners live there and insure buildings and contents together.

The house meets every Flood Re condition: private residential use, owner-occupied, a single unit, Band B, built before 2009, in the UK. An insurer that would otherwise price the flood risk high can cede the flood element and pay Flood Re the fixed Band B premium for 2026/27. The household still pays the insurer’s full premium, which includes every other peril and the insurer’s costs, but the flood portion no longer reflects the street’s modelled risk.

Suppose the house floods. The insurer handles the claim, the owners pay the £250 flood excess, and Flood Re reimburses the insurer. If the insurer participates in Build Back Better, the repair can include, say, a concrete floor in place of the old timber one and a non-return valve on the drain, paid for up to the insurer’s limit within the £10,000 ceiling.

Now change one fact: the same street, but a house completed in 2012. Flood Re cannot help. The owners depend on the open market, and if they cannot find cover at an acceptable price, they have no scheme to fall back on.

What to ask an insurer or broker

The questions below are the ones that change the outcome.

1. Is flood included as standard, and are there any flood-specific exclusions or sub-limits?
2. What is the flood excess, and is it different from the excess for other claims?
3. Will the flood element of this policy be ceded to Flood Re? The insurer may not say in advance, but it can confirm whether it uses the scheme.
4. Does the insurer offer Build Back Better, and what is its limit?
5. Which data does the insurer use for the address? If the result looks wrong, ask whether new evidence, such as a surveyed floor level or a flood risk report, can be considered.
6. Do resilience measures already installed affect the price or terms?
7. How does a claim work in practice: who to call, and whether drying-out and alternative accommodation are covered.

A broker can approach several insurers at once, which helps when online quotes for a high-risk address come back declined or unusually expensive. Flood Re’s website also has a “Find an insurer” tool listing insurers that use the scheme.

The 2039 problem

Flood Re is due to close in 2039. Its purpose is transitional: to keep flood cover available while the market moves towards prices that reflect risk without a subsidy. The 2025-26 annual report describes the scheme’s pressures as “structural rather than cyclical” and warns that, if Flood Re left the market today, many of the households it supports would face sharp premium rises or no cover at all.

Several changes aim to narrow that gap before 2039: Build Back Better, the pilot of Flood Performance Certificates for homes, and in 2025 the scheme’s first catastrophe bond. Whether they will be enough is an open question. Homes in the highest-risk streets will still be in those streets in 2039, and the projection of around 8 million properties at risk in England by mid-century points the wrong way.

How the UK’s approach compares with France’s CatNat regime or Spain’s Consorcio, both of which make cover close to universal by law, is set out on the schemes comparison page. For the maps behind an insurer’s view of an address, see the guides to checking long term flood risk and to flood risk maps, and the UK flood risk overview.