Is boiler cover worth it?
The honest maths on annual boiler insurance, when it pays for itself, and when you are better off putting the money in a tin.
14 July 2026 · 5 min read
Boiler cover runs from about £8 to £25 a month, so £96 to £300 a year. Whether that is smart depends almost entirely on how old your boiler is.
When cover is probably worth it
Your boiler is out of warranty and over eight years old. Parts fail on a curve, and you are on the wrong end of it.
You could not comfortably find £500 in a hurry. Cover is not really insurance in that case, it is a way of turning an unpredictable bill into a predictable one, and there is nothing wrong with that.
You are a landlord. The annual service and CP12 are often bundled, and the admin alone can justify it.
When it is probably not
Your boiler is under warranty. You are paying twice for the same protection. Check the warranty length before you buy anything - many are now ten years.
Your boiler is under five and serviced. The odds of a big failure are genuinely low.
You could absorb a £500 bill without pain. Over ten years you will likely pay £1,500 to £2,500 in premiums. That buys a lot of repairs.
The bits people miss in the small print
The excess. £60 or £99 per claim is common, and it makes cover much less useful for small faults.
The exclusion for pre-existing faults, and for boilers over a certain age - some policies will not cover a boiler over fifteen at all, or will cover it but exclude the parts most likely to fail.
The service requirement. If you skip the annual service, the policy may not pay out, which puts you in exactly the position you were paying to avoid.
The uncomfortable question
If your boiler is old enough that cover looks obviously worthwhile, it is old enough that you should be pricing a replacement. Paying £250 a year to insure a machine that is wasting a few hundred a year in gas is a strange place to be standing.