Almost everything about your car and its usage affects your car insurance premiums. This can include anything from the distance you drive each year, to whether or not you have a bespoke paint job. Where you park it is just another factor to add to the long list of things that car insurance underwriters consider when deciding how much to charge you. Here’s why, and what difference it can make.
All insurers will ask where you usually park your car as part of the process to get a quote. We’ve summarised the typical options below. The precise list will vary by insurer, and may be different for where you park your car during the day vs overnight.
It can do, yes. Insurers and price comparison sites will ask whether you park your car in the same place overnight and during the day. If you park near home overnight, but typically park near your place of work during the day, you’ll need to provide both locations.
You’ll need to give the answer that applies most of the time. So if you park near your workplace during the daytime Monday to Friday, and park near home during the daytime at the weekend, you’ll need to choose the option that applies Monday to Friday (as that’s “most of the time”).
It’s the type and rough location of where you park “most of the time” that matters, rather than the specific spot. So, if you don’t have a dedicated parking spot and need to park wherever there’s a space on the nearby streets, you’re still usually parking on a street or road near home. Or if, for example, you usually park in a residential car park, but occasionally it’s full and you have to park on the street, you should be fine to put “residential parking” as this is where you park most of the time.
If, however, it’s more variable than that, and it’s not possible to answer where you park most of the time, speak to your insurer about how to answer. This might apply, for example, if you travel for work and have to park in a different daytime location every day.
Some factors that affect car insurance are a bit of a head-scratcher at first glance – whether you’re a pharmacist or a financial analyst, for example. But it makes a bit more intuitive sense that where you park affects how much you pay.
When they set your premiums, insurers tend to put more weight towards things that increase your chances making a claim (and therefore costing them money). Conversely, they’ll put less weight towards things that will reduce your chance of incidents. So, just as they’ll tend to charge more for a young, inexperienced driver who’s more likely to make a mistake and have an accident than for someone who’s been behind the wheel for years, if you park somewhere that reduces your chance of theft or damage, your premiums are likely to be lower – particularly if you have a high end car.
That said, the places that you or I might regard as the “safest” places to park aren’t always directly in line with how insurers see it, as we explain below.
When setting premiums, insurers will review data that indicates your likelihood of claiming, including the history of all claims made in the areas where you park and drive. This means that the difference in your premiums based on where you park will vary from area to area. In some areas it will make very little difference. But if, for example, an insurer has evidence that drivers that park on the road in a particular postcode are far more likely to make a claim than those that park on a driveway, you could see much bigger differences.
Of course, we often don’t have a choice about where we park. But if you do, it could be worth tweaking your answers to see how much difference it makes to your quotes. It’s important that whatever option you state, you do actually park in that location most of the time. If you don’t, and the insurer finds out when you make a claim, it could invalidate your insurance.
To give you an idea of how much impact different parking options can have, we’ve used a price comparison site to run a few quotes for a 32-year-old teacher, Holly, who lives in Berkshire and drives a Vauxhall Corsa.
| Parking location | Cheapest quote | Average of 5 cheapest quotes |
|---|---|---|
| In a garage day and night | £680.43 | £729.89 |
| On a driveway day and night | £681.39 | £737.59 |
| On the road near home day and night | £680.78 | £744.98 |
| On a driveway at night, in a workplace car park during the day* | £666.76 | £757.20 |
* In this scenario, Holly has selected that she uses her car for ‘social and commuting’, as she obviously drives to work. For other scenarios, she has selected ‘social use’ only. Prices gathered in March 2024.
As the scenario above illustrates, where you park your car doesn’t always make a huge amount of difference to your car insurance premiums. For Holly, when parking in the same location day and night, there was only a few pence difference in the very cheapest quotes. And, contrary to what you might expect, parking in her school’s car park during the day (and adding commuting to her driving habits) actually decreased the cheapest quote by around £14.
When we took the average of the 5 cheapest quotes for each option, there was a more logical pattern. In this case, parking in a garage offered the cheapest quotes (on average). Parking on the driveway, on the road, and in a different location during the daytime each added a few quid to the average premium.
As a rule of thumb, parking on the street tends to incur higher premiums. That’s because cars are more at risk of scrapes from passing traffic, plus they may be more vulnerable to opportunistic thieves or vandals.
The best place to park is more up for debate. You might assume that insurers would always prefer a locked garage. But, in practice, the chance of you scratching or denting your car driving in and out of a tight garage might outweigh the security benefits for some insurers, particularly if you live in a low crime area. So if you have the choice of parking in a garage or on the driveway, it’s worth checking both options when getting quotes.
There are a few things you can do to keep your car secure. Some can save you money on your car insurance premiums. Others won’t immediately reduce your premiums, but could reduce the risk of you needing to make a claim. This will help avoid the need to pay an excess, and will also retain your no-claims discount, which will keep costs down in the long term.
You don’t always have a choice of where you park, but there are other ways to keep the cost of car insurance to a minimum.
Whether where you park affects your car insurance premiums, and by how much, will depend on the area you live in and, potentially, the specific car you drive. Not everyone has a choice of where to park. But if you do, it’s worth running quotes for each option, to see if you could save a bit of money. And remember that different insurers may have different ideas of where the “best” place to park is, so it’s always worth comparing quotes to find the best deal for your circumstances.
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