It does not cover cracks caused by ordinary settlement, by movement with temperature, by shrinkage or by wear and tear, and it does not cover the crack itself. What it covers is the cause, and then only when the cause is one of the perils listed in the policy.
Nearly every dispute begins with that distinction.
What is actually covered
Almost every buildings policy sold in this country lists subsidence, heave and landslip. Insurers use the three terms precisely, so it pays to know what each one means.
Subsidence is the ground beneath the foundations moving downwards. It typically happens because shrinkable clay has dried out and contracted. It is the common one in England, and it is a summer and autumn problem.
Heave is the reverse. The ground swells upwards, usually over several years, after a large tree has been removed and the clay it had been drying out gradually takes up water again.
Landslip is ground moving sideways down a slope.
Where a crack results from one of the three, a claim will usually fund the investigation and the repair, and sometimes work to deal with the cause. What counts as damage rather than deferred maintenance is argued over constantly, particularly where drainage renewal or a neighbour's tree is involved.
The excess is set so high because subsidence claims are expensive. Insurers paid out £72 million on domestic subsidence in the second quarter of 2026 alone, and the average claim reached a record £20,000. Across the whole of 2025, subsidence payouts came to £307 million.
What is not covered
Settlement. New buildings, and newly extended ones, compress the ground beneath them for the first few years. It is expected rather than defective, and most policies exclude it by name.
Movement with temperature and moisture. Materials expanding and contracting, which accounts for a great many of the hairline cracks people worry about.
Shrinkage. Plaster and render drying out. Common in the first couple of years after any plastering work has been done.
Wear and tear. Insurance covers the sudden and the unforeseen. A wall that has degraded slowly over thirty years is a maintenance question, not an insurance one.
Poor workmanship or defective design. That is a dispute with the builder or with the warranty provider.
Pre-existing damage. Anything that was already there when the policy started, whether or not you knew about it.
There is also a practical limit nobody writes into the policy. Redecoration after a repair is often restricted, so the finished result may not match the rest of the room.
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Why claims get declined
The commonest reason is that an engineer inspects and concludes the movement is not subsidence. The investigation is normally arranged and paid for by the insurer, though it is worth checking how your own excess wording treats an unsuccessful claim.
Misrepresentation comes next, and it is widely misunderstood. The law here changed in the policyholder's favour.
Since the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012, consumers have had no general duty to volunteer information to an insurer. What you must do is take reasonable care not to misrepresent when answering the questions you are actually asked. If a property's history of movement was asked about and answered wrongly, the insurer's remedy depends on whether that was careless, in which case it is proportionate and might mean a reduced payment, or deliberate, which is treated far more seriously. If you were never asked at all, that is a different position again. If you are told otherwise, it is worth taking the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service.
Then there is the excess. Where a repair costs £1,400 and the subsidence excess is £1,000, the sum recoverable is small, and a recorded claim stays attached to the property for good. Weighing one against the other is a judgement only you can make, and your insurer or a broker can tell you how they would record it.
Things worth knowing before you telephone anybody
A recorded subsidence claim follows the property, not you. Future insurers will ask about it. It does not make a house uninsurable, but fewer insurers tend to quote and specialist cover costs more.
Insurers generally want to inspect before any repairs happen. Work carried out first destroys the evidence they would have been assessing. Dated photographs, and crack widths measured against something of known size over a period of months, are useful to everybody involved.
The insurer instructs the engineer. On a subsidence claim, the loss adjuster and the structural engineer are normally appointed by the insurer rather than by you. You can commission your own report if you disagree with the outcome, but you will pay for it.
Monitoring takes a long time. Establishing whether movement is ongoing or historic means measuring it across a full year, so investigations routinely run for twelve months or more. That is the nature of the assessment rather than a delaying tactic. If you believe a claim is genuinely being mishandled, the Financial Ombudsman Service is free to use, and you can go to it once the insurer has given you a final response or once eight weeks have passed.
Buying a house with cracks in the walls
If you are buying rather than owning, the question inverts. It is no longer whether the insurer will pay, but whether an insurer will quote at all.
There are three things worth establishing before you exchange.
The first is whether the property has a claims history. This appears on the TA6 property information form, and a seller who is asked has to answer truthfully.
The second is whether you can get buildings cover at a normal price. You can test this with an indicative quotation before you commit. If mainstream insurers decline, that tells you something a survey might not.
The third is what the ground is made of: shrinkable clay, mature trees, made ground, a filled watercourse. That last is public record, and it is the part most commonly skipped, because reading it properly needs mapping software rather than a postcode lookup.
A house with cosmetic cracks on stable gravel is a different proposition from one with identical cracks on London Clay and a poplar six metres from the rear wall. The cracks look the same; the risk does not.
What this page cannot settle
Whether your policy covers your crack is not something it can tell you. Wordings differ between insurers and between years, exclusions vary, and the answer turns on a cause nobody has established yet. Read your schedule, and telephone your insurer before doing anything irreversible.
What is knowable in advance is what the ground under an address is made of, whether it shrinks, how the recent drought record reads there and what is growing nearby. Those determine whether subsidence is even a plausible explanation, long before anybody starts arguing about wording.
Our Ground module covers what a property in England or Wales is standing on, its shrink swell potential, and the tree and drought context around it. We are not insurers, brokers, surveyors or engineers. We do not sell insurance and we take no commission from anybody. This is information about how cover generally works. It is not advice on your policy or on your claim.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains British Geological Survey data © Crown copyright and database right.