Never let an insurance renewal catch you off guard.

Insurers are required to send a renewal notice before your policy rolls over, and for most home and motor policies that arrives around three to four weeks ahead. The notice has to show last year's premium alongside this year's so you can see the change. On paper that is plenty of warning.

In practice the notice arrives as one email among hundreds, or as a letter that goes on a pile. If you have four or five policies across a household, those notices land at unrelated points in the year and none of them feel urgent at the moment they arrive. The deadline only becomes real once it has passed.

Setting your own reminder a few weeks before the date puts the prompt somewhere you will actually see it, and puts you in control of the timing rather than the insurer.

For years insurers used a practice called price walking, nudging premiums up at each renewal on the assumption most customers would not switch. Financial Conduct Authority research found home insurance customers of five years or more were paying around 70% more than new customers for the same cover.

From January 2022 the FCA required insurers to offer renewing customers a price no higher than an equivalent new customer would pay. That closed the worst of the gap in home and motor insurance, and it is a genuine improvement.

It is not a reason to stop comparing. Insurers still price on their own view of risk, still change what a policy includes and still differ enormously from each other. The rule guarantees your insurer is not penalising your loyalty. It does not guarantee your insurer is the cheapest, or that the cover has not quietly narrowed. Our guide on avoiding the insurance loyalty penalty covers this in more detail.

Price is the obvious thing and the easiest to compare, but a cheaper policy is not automatically a better one. Check the excess first, since a lower premium is often paid for with a higher excess you only discover when you claim. Then check the cover limits, particularly for contents, single items and accidental damage.

Look at what has been added or removed since last year. Legal expenses cover, home emergency cover and courtesy car provision are common items that get bundled in one year and dropped the next. If your circumstances have changed, a new roof, a new job, a change in mileage or a home extension, the policy may no longer match what you actually need.

Finally, call your current insurer before you switch. Retention teams frequently match or beat a competitor quote, and the whole conversation takes ten minutes. You only get that option if you started early enough to have a quote in hand. Our guide on why insurance renewal prices increase explains what tends to drive the change.

Most households carry more insurance than they realise. Buildings, contents, car, van, pet, travel, life, income protection, gadget cover, breakdown cover and boiler cover are all common, and they are frequently spread across five or six different providers.

Because each one renews independently, there is no single moment in the year when you review them all. That is what makes the occasional lapse so easy. One policy renews in March, another in July and a third in November, and each is handled in isolation with no memory of the last.

Holding all of them in one list changes the picture. You can see the whole year at once, spot which renewals cluster together and notice where you are paying twice for overlapping cover. Gadget cover duplicated inside a contents policy and travel insurance duplicated by a packaged bank account are two of the most common overlaps. Our guide on how to track insurance policies walks through building that list.