Loss of use, and additional living expenses

What it pays for

The principle is additional cost rather than total cost. It is designed to keep your outgoings roughly where they were, not to cover everything you spend while displaced.

So it typically reimburses the difference between what you normally spend and what you are now forced to spend — temporary accommodation, and the extra costs that come with being somewhere that is not your home.

• Temporary accommodation while the home is uninhabitable
• The additional cost of meals where there is no kitchen
• Additional travel where the temporary home is further from work or school
• Storage of belongings during repairs
• Boarding for pets where the temporary accommodation cannot take them
• Laundry and similar costs a temporary place forces on you

The two limits on it

Policies limit this section in one of two ways and it is worth knowing which yours uses, because they behave very differently in a long claim.

Some cap it as a proportion of the dwelling limit — a pot of money that runs out. Others limit it by time, paying for a defined period regardless of the amount, which is generally the more useful shape after a serious loss.

Either way it runs for the time reasonably required to repair or rebuild, not until you personally feel settled, and it ends when the home is habitable again.

It follows the main claim

Loss of use responds only where the damage itself is covered. If the cause is excluded — flood being the common example — then the accommodation costs that follow from it are generally excluded too.

That is the single most important thing to understand about this section, and it is why the exclusions on the rest of the policy matter more than they look like they do.

It also generally requires the home to be genuinely uninhabitable rather than merely unpleasant to live in, though what qualifies is more practical than technical — no water, no power, no safe access.

Keep the receipts

This section reimburses against evidence. Claims here are settled on documentation more than on argument, and the documentation is easy to collect at the time and impossible to reconstruct later.

Keep everything: accommodation, meals, fuel, storage, boarding. Note what you would normally have spent, since the reimbursement is usually for the difference.

Tell your insurer before committing to anything substantial. Agreeing the arrangement in advance is generally faster than presenting an invoice afterwards and asking them to accept it.