Cover check: which provision decides your water claim

Six questions. Every one of them maps onto a provision, and the answer tells you which provision your claim is actually about. It runs entirely in your browser: nothing you click is sent anywhere, stored anywhere or used for anything.

Why six questions and not twenty

Because six is all it takes. Read the Insurance Contracts Regulations 2017 and the number of provisions that decide a domestic water claim is very small:

• What sort of policy decides whether you are inside reg 33 at all.
• Whether a broker arranged it decides whether reg 33(2) takes you back out.
• Where the water came from decides between reg 19(1)(a)(vi), reg 19(1)(a)(xiv) and reg 34(1). This is the big one.
• How long it ran decides whether reg 19(2)(b) is in play.
• Sixty days unoccupied decides whether reg 19(2)(f) removes the event entirely.
• What got wet decides whether reg 19(2)(g)(i) — the fence exclusion — applies, and whether you need a building policy, a contents policy or both.

Everything else an insurer asks is either detail on those six or is about quantum rather than cover.

What this tool will not do

• Tell you your claim will be paid. It cannot see your policy. Standard cover is a floor an insurer may sell below, provided it clearly informed you in writing that it was doing so.
• Give you a percentage chance. Nobody has that data and anyone publishing one made it up.
• Collect your answers. Nothing is sent. The evaluation happens in your browser from a rules file that ships with the page, and you can read it: it is at /assets/js/aufacts.js?v=7dd17ed0.
• Replace reading your schedule. The schedule is the document that says what you bought, including your excess, your flood position and your mould sub-limit.

A worked example, so you can see what it does

Take a real shape of event: a braided flexible hose under a bathroom vanity perished overnight in a house that has been empty for three months while probate is sorted out. The building is insured; the contents are not; the owner bought the policy direct.

Answered into the tool, that is: home building, no broker, a fixed pipe, sudden, yes unoccupied more than sixty days, the building itself. And the answer it gives is not the one most people expect, because the vacancy rule outranks everything else.

• Reg 19(1)(a)(vi) names the escape of water as an event standard cover includes. That much is true and it is the answer you would get for the same failure in an occupied house.
• But reg 19(2)(f) drops most events, including subparagraph (vi), once a home has been unoccupied for a continuous period of more than 60 days. Lightning, earthquake and the impact events survive it. A burst hose does not.

Change one answer — the house was occupied — and the same event is a textbook escape of water claim. Change a different one — the water came from a creek rather than a hose — and the question stops being about cover at all and becomes whether flood cover was bought, because reg 34(1) settles what the word means regardless of what the policy says.

That is the whole value of six questions: the provisions interact, and which one wins is not obvious from any single fact. The 60-day rule has its own note, because it catches deceased estates, renovations and rentals between tenants, and almost nobody has read it.

Once you have the answer

Whatever provision came up, the next three steps are the same. Lodge, because General Insurance Code of Practice, paragraph 68 starts a 10 business days clock on the insurer telling you what it needs. Start the drying, because it is a reasonable step to prevent further loss and because water moves up a contamination category with time. And write everything down, because General Insurance Code of Practice, paragraph 82 lets you ask for the reports the insurer relied on and you will want to compare them against your own record.

The 48-hour checklist has the full sequence.

Common questions