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Two quotes for the same cover, one with a bigger excess and a smaller premium. The question is how long the smaller premium has to run before it has paid for the bigger excess.
A label only. Nothing here is converted.
A year of cover, as quoted.
Compulsory and voluntary added together.
Your guess, not a prediction of ours.
Put both quotes in: the yearly premium and the excess that goes with each. Every figure is one your insurer gave you.
An excess is only paid when you actually claim, and only when the damage is worth more than the excess. Raising the excess past the cost of a scraped bumper quietly turns small accidents into things you pay for in full and never tell the insurer about, which is a real saving on the premium and a real cost you should count on the other side.
Two things sit outside this arithmetic. A claim usually costs you a no-claims discount as well as an excess, so the year after a claim is dearer than the excess alone suggests. And some excesses are layered — a compulsory amount, a voluntary amount you chose, and sometimes an extra for a young or newly qualified driver — so add up everything the schedule says you would pay before you type it in here.
When a policy pays out, it pays out minus a fixed amount you promised to fund yourself. That amount is usually two amounts bolted together: a compulsory excess the insurer sets and will not negotiate, and a voluntary excess you chose in exchange for a smaller premium. Some schedules add a third for a young driver, a newly qualified one, or a named driver under a certain age. Add every layer that would apply to you before typing a figure in, because the arithmetic only works on the total you would actually hand over.
Raising the voluntary part is the only lever on that list you control, and the insurer prices it because it works: you absorb the small claims, they keep the large ones, and both sides save the administrative cost of arguing about a bumper.
Suppose one quote asks 840 a year with a 250 excess and another asks 735 with a 750 excess. The saving is 105 every year and the risk is 500 more on any claim you make, so the saving needs four years and nine months of quiet motoring to cover a single claim. Bump the windscreen in year two and the higher excess has already lost; drive to year six untouched and it is comfortably ahead.
That is the whole shape of the decision, and nothing about it tells you which branch you are on. An insurer prices your risk from what people resembling you did in aggregate, and even they get individuals wrong constantly. A web page handed four numbers knows less than the insurer does. It can tell you exactly what the wager pays; it cannot tell you whether to place it.
The first is your no-claims discount. Making a claim usually costs you several years of accumulated discount as well as the excess, and the renewal after a claim can rise by more than the excess itself. Protected no-claims cover softens that and carries its own price. None of it is folded into the break-even, so treat the figure as the floor of what a claim costs rather than the whole bill.
The second is what happens to claims worth less than the excess. Push the voluntary amount above the cost of an ordinary scrape and you have quietly agreed to pay for small damage in full and never mention it. That is a genuine saving on the premium and a genuine cost on the other side of the ledger, and it only balances if you can produce the money on the day the car is on a ramp.
Could you pay the higher excess this month, without borrowing, if you had to? An excess is not a theoretical figure; it falls due at the worst possible moment, alongside a hire car and a week of disrupted travel. Somebody with no savings buffer is trading a certain small saving for an uncertain large bill they cannot meet, and the break-even year count is irrelevant to them.
If the answer is yes, the calculation above is the right way to size the trade. If it is no, take the lower excess and read the saving as the price of not having that problem.
Not always, and not always by much. Insurers discount steeply for the first step up and much less for the ones after it, so doubling the voluntary amount a second time can buy almost nothing. Get quotes at each level and compare the actual figures rather than assuming the discount scales.
It depends on the policy. Glass and windscreen claims frequently carry their own separate, smaller excess, and some cover for fire, theft or courtesy cars is treated differently again. The policy schedule lists each one, and those are the numbers to compare rather than the headline figure on the quote.
You pay for it yourself and there is nothing to claim, because the insurer only pays the amount above the excess. This is worth thinking about before you raise the figure, since it converts a category of small incidents from insured events into out-of-pocket ones.
Not into the premium saving, which is measured between two quotes at the same discount level. Its effect belongs on the claim side instead: a claim costs you the excess and then several dearer renewals, so the true penalty for being wrong is larger than the break-even suggests.