Solar panels you own outright are normally covered by your buildings insurance, because buildings cover pays to repair damage to the structure of the property. You have no legal duty to volunteer that you have fitted them. You do have a legal duty to take reasonable care not to misrepresent anything when your insurer asks you a question, and almost every renewal form asks about alterations.
That distinction is the whole thing. Under the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012, the old duty to tell your insurer everything material was abolished and replaced with something narrower: answer their questions carefully and honestly. Panels sit awkwardly across that line. An array is an ordinary home improvement and a five-figure asset bolted to your roof, and it changes what a rebuild would cost.
Below: what buildings cover does and does not reach, the exact statutory wording on what you must say, the sliding scale of what an insurer may do to your claim if you got it wrong, the separate insurance your installer is required to carry, and the free route if a claim is refused.
Ask each installer for the total installed cost in writing, including scaffolding. That figure is what you will add to your rebuild sum insured, so you want it before you ring your insurer, not after.
Get My Free Quotes →Are solar panels covered by home insurance?
Usually yes, under the buildings section rather than contents, if you own them. Citizens Advice describes buildings insurance as covering "the cost of repairing damage to the structure of your property", extending to "garages, sheds and fences" and "the cost of replacing items such as pipes, cables and drains". A roof-mounted array is fixed to the structure and reads the same way to most insurers: part of the building, not a possession you could carry out of it.
That is the general position, not a guarantee about your policy. Policy wording varies by insurer and cover is not automatic, so the only way to know is to read the schedule or ask the question directly. Three things are worth checking by name rather than assuming:
- Storm and wind damage to the array itself, not just to the roof underneath it.
- Theft of panels, inverters and cabling, particularly for ground-mounted arrays away from the house. Our guide to ground-mounted solar panels covers the security side of that.
- The cost of removing and refitting the array if the roof beneath it has to be repaired after an insured event. That is a real bill involving scaffolding and an MCS installer, and it is not the same job as replacing tiles on a bare roof.
Buildings insurance is also not compulsory in itself. Citizens Advice puts it plainly: it "isn't compulsory but it is advisable", while being "usually compulsory if you're planning to buy your home with a mortgage", where it "will be a condition of the mortgage and must be at least enough to cover the outstanding mortgage". If you own outright and carry no cover, the panels are uninsured along with everything else.
Do you have to tell your insurer you have solar panels?
You do not have to volunteer it. You do have to answer their questions accurately, and in practice that comes to the same thing, because insurers ask about alterations. Section 2 of the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 is short and specific: "It is the duty of the consumer to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation to the insurer", and that duty "replaces any duty relating to disclosure or representations by a consumer to an insurer which existed in the same circumstances before this Act applied".
So the pre-2013 world, where a homeowner was expected to guess what an underwriter might find material and declare it unprompted, is gone. What replaced it is a duty tied to the questions you are actually asked. New quote forms and renewal declarations routinely ask whether the property has been altered, extended or improved, and whether anything has changed since last year. A solar installation is an alteration to the building. Answering no is a misrepresentation, however innocently it happens.
The practical rule is simple. Tell them at the next renewal, or sooner if the policy contains a condition requiring you to report changes to the property during the term, which many do. Put it in writing or keep the call reference, and ask them to confirm the array is included and at what sum insured.
The total installed cost, the system size in kWp, the installation date, your MCS certificate number, and whether a battery is fitted. That is the full set of questions most insurers ask, and having it to hand is the difference between a two-minute call and a callback.
What happens to a claim if you did not tell them
It depends entirely on whether the law treats the mistake as careless or as deliberate, and the difference is severe. Schedule 1 of the same Act sets out what an insurer may do about a qualifying misrepresentation.
| How the misrepresentation is treated | What the insurer may do |
|---|---|
| Deliberate or reckless | "Avoid the contract and refuse all claims", and keep the premiums you paid, except where it "would be unfair to the consumer to retain them" |
| Careless, and the insurer would not have insured you at all | Avoid the contract and refuse all claims, but it "must return the premiums paid" |
| Careless, and the insurer would have used different terms | The contract "is to be treated as if it had been entered into on those different terms", which can mean a new exclusion applied retrospectively to your claim |
| Careless, and the insurer would have charged more | "Reduce proportionately the amount to be paid on a claim" |
Source: Schedule 1, Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012, read on legislation.gov.uk on 11 September 2026.
That last row is the one worth understanding, because it is the likeliest outcome and the least known. The Act defines "reduce proportionately" as the insurer needing to "pay on the claim only X% of what it would otherwise have been under an obligation to pay under the terms of the contract", where the percentage is worked out by comparing the premium you actually paid against the higher premium the insurer would have charged had it known.
Run that through a real claim. Suppose you paid £300 for the year and the insurer would have charged £400 with the array declared. You are at three quarters of the correct premium, so the proportionate remedy leaves you with 75 per cent of the settlement. On a £20,000 fire claim that is £15,000, and a £5,000 hole you fill yourself, over a question you skimmed on a renewal form. Nobody accused you of fraud. The arithmetic does not care.
Your rebuild cost goes up, so the sum insured has to
A solar array is a permanent part of the building, so the figure that has to move is the rebuild cost, not the market value of the house. Citizens Advice is explicit that these are different numbers: "The cost of rebuilding your home is not the same as the price you paid for your home, or its current value if you were to sell it", and "Rebuild costs are usually less than the current market value, so make sure you don't over or under insure yourself". It points homeowners at the Building Cost Information Service calculator hosted on the Association of British Insurers' website.
Your rebuild figure should now carry the installed cost of the system, including the scaffolding and labour that a replacement would need, not the panel prices alone. See our breakdown of UK solar panel costs and the cost by system size table for what a like-for-like replacement would realistically run to.
Underinsurance is the quiet risk here. If the sum insured is short across the whole property, a partial claim can be scaled back for that reason alone, independently of anything to do with misrepresentation. Adding £7,000 of kit to the roof and leaving the rebuild figure untouched for another five renewals is how a shortfall creeps in.
The house value question is separate, and better evidenced than most people assume. Our guide to whether solar panels add value to your house covers what the research actually found on sale prices.
Will solar panels increase your premium?
There is no single UK figure, because premiums are priced by each insurer from its own claims experience, and any article quoting one number for every household is guessing. What you can do is understand the factors an underwriter is looking at, then ask for the quote with and without the array declared and compare them yourself.
- The value on the roof. More rebuild cost usually means more premium, in the same way an extension does.
- Fire. UK fire and rescue services attended 212 fires involving solar panels in 2025, according to a Freedom of Information exercise run across fire and rescue services by the insurer QBE and published in August 2026. The components involved are mostly the DC electrical parts rather than the panels themselves, and set against roughly 1.9 million installations the rate is low. Our solar panel fire risk guide works through the arithmetic and the installation faults behind it.
- Who fitted it. An MCS certified installation with the certificate to prove it is a better risk than an undocumented one. Our guide to choosing an MCS installer explains what the certificate covers.
- Battery storage. If you have added storage, say so. Our solar battery storage guide covers where batteries are typically sited and why that matters.
- Maintenance and access. Insurers care about how a roof gets worked on. See solar panel maintenance for what routine upkeep involves.
The insurance your installer has to carry
Separate from your home insurance, and it protects you during the job and afterwards. The Renewable Energy Consumer Code, RECC, is one of the two consumer codes MCS certified installers belong to, and it imposes insurance requirements on its members.
RECC states that the code "requires members to have in place Public Liability, Professional Indemnity and Employers' Liability Insurance". Public liability is the one that answers if scaffolding goes through your conservatory roof, and it sits with the installer, not with you.
RECC also requires protection for your money and your workmanship warranty. Its guidance for consumers states that "all members must insure any deposits and further advance (or 'stage') payments they take, together with the workmanship warranties they issue, to protect a consumer against an installer ceasing to trade". The cover itself comes from third party providers rather than RECC, and the terms differ between them: the providers listed on that page offer insurance-backed guarantees ranging from one to twelve years, and deposit protection periods ranging from 35 to 120 days.
That range matters at the quoting stage. Two installers can both be RECC members and hand you very different pieces of paper. Ask which provider backs the guarantee and for how many years, and read the certificate when it arrives. An insurance-backed guarantee is not home insurance and it is not the panel manufacturer's product warranty. It is the thing that pays for someone else to put right the installer's work if the installer is gone, and our guide to how long solar panels last explains where each of those warranties bites.
Leased and rent-a-roof panels are a different problem
If the panels are not yours, the lease decides who insures them, and your insurer needs to know the roof is subject to one. Rent-a-roof arrangements from the Feed-in Tariff era leave a third party owning the equipment on your roof under a long lease, which is a fact about your property in exactly the way an underwriter means it.
Get the lease out before you ring anyone, and be ready to say who owns the panels, who is responsible for insuring and maintaining them, and how long the lease has to run. The same paperwork causes trouble when selling, which we cover in the does solar add value guide, and it is the one situation where the answer to "are my panels covered" may genuinely be no, because they are not yours to cover.
If your insurer refuses a solar claim
Complain to the insurer first, then take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service, which is free. The FOS explains that "for most complaints, a business has up to 8 weeks to consider a complaint", and that if you have not had a response within the time limits you can refer the complaint onwards. It is emphatic about cost: "Our service is free and easy to use. You don't need to pay anyone to represent you, for example, a lawyer or claims management company".
Watch the clock at the other end. The FOS time limits guidance is clear: "You have 6 months from the date on the final response you receive from the financial business to bring your complaint to us. If you complain after the 6 months, we usually won't be able to help." The clock starts on the date the business sends its final response, so a refusal letter left in a drawer over a busy winter is a live deadline.
The five-minute version
- Tell your insurer at renewal, or sooner if your policy requires notice of changes. You do not have to volunteer it, but you must answer their questions accurately.
- Add the installed cost of the system to your rebuild sum insured, not to the market value.
- Ask, in writing, whether storm damage, theft and the removal and refit of the array are covered.
- Keep the MCS certificate, the invoice and the insurance-backed guarantee together. They are your proof at claim time and at sale time.
- If a claim is refused, complain, wait for the final response, and take it to the Financial Ombudsman Service within six months.
Ask each installer which consumer code they belong to, who provides their insurance-backed guarantee, and for how many years. It costs nothing to ask and it is the cheapest insurance decision you will make.
Request Solar Quotes →Frequently asked questions
You have no legal duty to volunteer it, but you must answer your insurer's questions accurately. Section 2 of the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 replaced the old duty of disclosure with a duty "to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation to the insurer". Since quote and renewal forms ask about alterations and improvements to the property, and a solar installation is one, the practical answer is yes: tell them at renewal, or sooner if your policy requires notice of changes during the term.
Buildings insurance, in most cases, because a roof-mounted array is fixed to the structure. Citizens Advice describes buildings cover as paying "the cost of repairing damage to the structure of your property", including items such as pipes, cables and drains. Policy wording varies between insurers, so check that storm damage to the array, theft, and the cost of removing and refitting the panels for a roof repair are all named in your schedule.
Schedule 1 of the Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 decides it. If the mistake was careless and the insurer would have charged a higher premium, it may "reduce proportionately the amount to be paid on a claim", paying only the percentage the premium you paid represents against the premium you should have paid. If it would not have insured you at all, it may avoid the contract and refuse claims, but must return your premiums. If the misrepresentation was deliberate or reckless, it may avoid the contract, refuse all claims and keep the premiums.
Sometimes, and there is no single figure that applies to every household, because each insurer prices from its own claims data. Adding an array raises your rebuild cost, which tends to raise the premium in the same way an extension does. The way to find out what it means for you is to get the quote both with and without the array declared and compare the two, rather than relying on a national average that does not exist.
Yes. The sum insured on a buildings policy is the cost of rebuilding the property, which Citizens Advice stresses is not the same as its market value or the price you paid. A permanently fixed array adds to what a rebuild would cost, including the scaffolding and labour to refit it, so the installed price of the system should be reflected in your rebuild figure rather than left out of it.
No. An insurance-backed guarantee covers the installer's workmanship warranty if the installer ceases trading. RECC requires its members to insure deposits, stage payments and the workmanship warranties they issue for exactly that purpose. The cover is provided by third party insurers whose terms vary widely, with guarantees on RECC's own provider list running from one year to twelve. Your home insurance is a separate policy covering damage to the building.
The lease decides, because the panels belong to the company that installed them rather than to you. Read the agreement to establish who is responsible for insuring and maintaining the equipment and how long the lease runs, then tell your own insurer that the roof is subject to a lease. This is the one common case where your buildings policy may not cover the array, since it is not your property.
Complain to the insurer, then escalate to the Financial Ombudsman Service. A business has up to eight weeks to consider most complaints, and the FOS service is free, with no need to pay a lawyer or claims management company. Once you have the final response you have six months to bring the complaint to the FOS, and after that it usually cannot help, so do not let the letter sit.