Garage insurance, and the gaps nobody reads.

The categories, in plain terms

Garage insurance is sold under names that vary by country and by insurer, so what matters is the category rather than the label on the schedule.

• Cover for customer vehicles in your care, custody or control, which is the one most specific to this trade.
• Liability for injury or damage to third parties, including customers on your premises.
• Employer liability for the people who work for you, which is compulsory in most places.
• Cover for the building, contents, tools and equipment, including theft.
• Cover for the work itself, so a faulty repair causing damage is not simply your problem.
• Business interruption, which pays while you cannot trade rather than replacing the thing that stopped you.

Most disputes are not about whether a workshop had insurance. They are about whether the incident fell inside a category they assumed was covered.

Customer vehicles are where the surprises live

This is the cover most specific to a workshop and the one most often found to be narrower than assumed.

The questions worth confirming rather than assuming: whether cover applies while the vehicle is being road tested, who is permitted to drive it, whether it extends to vehicles left overnight, and whether it applies off your premises during collection and delivery.

That last one catches mobile operations and any workshop offering collection. A policy written for vehicles on site may not follow the vehicle down the road, and the discovery usually happens after a driver has already been doing it for a year.

Read the conditions, not just the cover

Most declined claims are not about the wrong policy. They are about a condition in the right one that was not being met.

Common ones include specified security requirements such as alarms, locks or immobilisers that must actually be in use, key storage rules, limits on how many vehicles can be kept overnight, and requirements for equipment inspection and maintenance certificates.

None of these are unreasonable and all of them are checkable. The failure mode is a workshop that installed the alarm at inception and stopped setting it two years later, which is a condition breach discovered at claim time rather than a coverage gap.

Insure for what it costs to replace, not what you paid

Underinsurance is quiet and it is punished proportionally, which surprises people who assume a partial claim would simply be paid.

Where the sum insured is below the true value, many policies reduce a claim by the same proportion, so a workshop insured for two thirds of its equipment value may recover two thirds of a small loss rather than all of it. That mechanism turns a manageable incident into a serious one.

The fix is an annual look at replacement values as equipment is added, rather than carrying a figure set when the business was smaller. It costs nothing and it is the single most common material error in workshop policies.

Tell the insurer when the business changes

A policy describes a business, and businesses change faster than policies get updated.

Adding mobile fitting, taking on high-value vehicles, starting to work on electric vehicles, storing customer cars overnight, taking on an apprentice, or opening a second site are all changes that can affect cover materially, and none of them prompt a call to the broker on their own.

A short annual conversation covering what has changed is worth more than shopping the premium, because a cheaper policy that does not describe your business accurately is not cheaper at all.

Renewal is not a formality

With garage insurance the default is to accept the renewal invitation, and the default is usually the most expensive option available.

Reviewing means checking the sums insured, the conditions, and whether the business description still fits, then testing the market. Doing all three every year is a couple of hours and it typically pays better per hour than anything else on the administrative list.

Where a broker is involved, the useful question is not simply the price but what they would change about the cover. A broker who cannot name anything has either written a very good policy or not looked at it.