Cheaper car insurance if you drive less than 25 miles a day

If you only drive short distances – to and from a local workplace, or to drop the kids off at school – you might cover less than 25 miles a day.

So why should you pay the same as a driver who uses their car much more?

In this blog, we explain how you might be able to get a discount for covering few miles.

Not going the extra mile

There are a number of factors insurers take into account when giving a quote for your premium.

This includes things like what car you drive, where you live, how old you are and if you’ve had an accident in the last few years. It also includes how many miles you cover in your car.

You might think it’s none of your insurer’s business where you go and how many miles you clock but the reason they ask is to weigh up how much of a risk you are to insure.

Among other things, they use your mileage to gauge how likely you are to be in an accident, and if so, how serious that accident is likely to be. For example, if you commute 60 miles a day on the motorway, five days a week, they’ll deem you more at risk of having an accident (at high speed) than a pensioner who uses their car for their weekly shop on local roads.

Honesty is the best policy

Insurers use this information to provide you with a quote – and this relies on you being honest with your insurer on how much you use your car. Some insurers have started to realise that drivers underestimate the actual amount of miles they drive to push their premiums down.

So you might find that, depending on the provider and the other information you’ve inputted, your mileage doesn’t actually bring the price down by much.

The only way an insurer can know exactly how many miles you drive and whether this is what you said, is by monitoring it.

Boxed up

The best way to let your insurer know how far you drive every day is by telematics. Not sure what this is? You might have heard it called black box insurance and it just means you’ll get a little device installed in your car. This tracks how far you drive and what time you drive at and if you’re a safer driver, you could get cheaper premiums.

As a driver who covers less than 25 miles day, it can be a way of getting a cheaper quote. That’s because they know to the mile how far you go in your car. You choose how many miles a year you expect you’ll do – for example, 6,000, 8,000 or 10,000. To make sense of that, if you drive 25 miles a day, you will drive 9,125 miles in a year. So if you chose 10,000 miles, then you’d have some miles to play with.

If you’re a new driver, telematics can also be a cost-effective way for you to get insurance.

Bespoke low mileage insurance

You may only cover short distances in your car but not like the idea of your insurer being able to track you, so you might not want to go for black box insurance.

If this is you, there are specific insurance companies that cater for drivers who cover fewer miles. These include Rias and Quoterack, and they both offer similar discounts for drivers who cover few annual miles.

One of the main things to think about when you’re considering bespoke low mileage insurance is that if you go above what you said you expected you would, you might find you can’t claim on your insurance policy or you’ll be charged for the excess mileage.

So you need to make sure that you either err on the side of caution by insuring yourself for more miles than you think you will do, or when you’re approaching the amount of miles you said you’d do, inform your insurer.

Insure and go

There are many factors involved in getting an insurance quote – mileage is just one of those.

So you might find that depending on your situation, and the insurer, it could make a big difference or not at all.

It’s worth shopping around for insurance, especially so if drive less than 25 miles a day. There are lots of providers and as we say, your quote depends on very many factors – only one of which is your mileage.

Wherever you choose to go for your insurance, the only thing we’d suggest is that any information you give your provider – including your mileage – is as accurate as it can be and if you’re unsure, just round it up. The last thing you want to do is invalidate your insurance.

So stay safe and happy driving!