Compare car insurance

Insurers look at a wide range of factors when generating a quote to offer you. These can significantly raise or lower your insurance premiums. The factors include:

• Your age – drivers under 25 usually pay much more for insurance.
• Your no-claims bonus – if you have not been driving for long, or you have recently made a claim, your premiums will be much higher.
• The car you drive – more expensive cars generally cost more to insure.

Check out the full list, plus eleven tips to cut the cost of your insurance.

The only instance in which car owners don’t need insurance is if it’s not in use and is being kept off the road. If this is the case, you will need to register a Statutory Off Road Notification with the DVLA, or SORN for short.

A no-claims bonus is a discount you can get on your insurance premiums as a reward for not making any insurance claims.

The value of the discount increases with each year that passes with no claims made, usually maxing out at the 15-year mark.

The value of the no-claims bonus varies between insurers, with some knocking 80% off the cost of a policy if you have not made a claim for five years.

Yes, it is a legal requirement for all motorists to be insured – although it isn’t always necessary for learners to buy their own policy.

Generally, driving schools and instructors have their own insurance, so you are covered by this to learn to drive in their car. 

If you’re learning to drive in your own car, you can purchase a learner driver’s insurance policy, covering provisional licence holders. While you can either get annual or short term cover, the former is likely to be the best option. This is because you may need more time than you think, and you can cancel an annual policy when you’ve passed.

Once you’ve passed, let your insurer know, and they can either cancel the policy or set up a new one for full licence holders. It’s worth bearing in mind that this will likely be more expensive.

Our car insurance comparison tool lets you compare policies for both provisional and full licence holders.

If you are learning to drive in a friend or family member’s car, you will still need cover of your own.

Yes. Car insurance insures the driver rather than the car, so you’ll always need cover to drive. If you’ll be sharing the car with a family member or a friend, you’ve got multiple options to get adequate cover.

Ask the car’s owner to add you to their policy as a named driver. Here, the existing policyholder just needs to get in touch with their insurer and let them know the details of any driver(s) they’d like to add to the policy.

If you’re a less experienced driver than the policyholder, for instance if you’re learning to drive or you’re younger, this will work out cheaper for you than your own cover (see below).

This is because an insurer will judge you as higher risk and so charge higher premiums for covering that car. By going on, say, your parents’ policy for their vehicle, that risk is counterbalanced in the insurer’s eyes by the proviso, when policies are amended like this, that they will be the main drivers. 

However, the drawback is that by adding you to their policy, the policyholder’s insurance premiums will be bumped up – and there is also the chance that, in the event of an accident, you jeopardise their no-claims bonus. 

Take out your own policy. This is where you get a normal insurance policy on somebody else’s car, covering you to drive it. It’s usually more expensive than being added to somebody’s existing policy.

If you’re learning to drive, you can buy something called “learner driver car insurance”. This is a separate policy – where you are using your parents’ car, you do not become a named driver – and so their no-claims bonus would not be affected. It can, though, work out more expensive than if you are a named driver.      

Get short-term cover. If you think you will only have to use somebody else’s car on a very short-term basis – for example, if you’re going on a road trip, or because your driving test date is approaching and you want to fit in some extra practice after learning with a driving school.

Lots of insurers let you take out temporary insurance, covering you to drive a car for anything between an hour and several months. The shorter the period you choose, the more you can keep costs down.

Veygo and Cuvva are two examples, but our car insurance comparison tool below lets you compare a wide array of short-term insurance policies.

Car insurance providers used to charge existing customers higher premiums on renewal than if they were new customers whose business the insurer wanted to win.

It meant that newer customers were benefiting from cheaper prices than longstanding ones.

However, the Financial Conduct Authority outlawed this practice at the beginning of 2022, meaning that renewing doesn’t mean you will be charged more than a new customer.

This has had the effect of making car insurance more expensive for drivers that regularly switch between providers, diminishing the savings they could earn by doing so. It also meant insurers increasing premiums for everyone, to an extent, in order to claim back any lost money that the ban has caused them.

Nonetheless, with the cost of living is soaring, it’s still worth seeing what’s out there every time you are coming up to the end of an insurance policy.

The optimal time to search for a new policy is about three weeks before your current one draws to a close. Read our full list of tips for beating rising insurance premiums.