A quieter, tougher quarter for home insurance claimants
The uphold rate for Financial Ombudsman decisions on home insurance claim disputes has fallen sharply in the most recent 90-day window, dropping to 24.0% from 33.0% in the prior 90-day period, a fall of 9.0 percentage points. At the same time, the number of decisions published fell from 754 to 479, a drop of 275 decisions, or 36.5%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so this is not a case of a handful of outlier rulings skewing the picture. But a fall in both volume and uphold rate happening together is worth examining carefully rather than treated as a single, simple story.
Home insurance claim disputes cover a wide range of scenarios: storm damage, subsidence, escape of water, theft and accidental damage among them. Across the full period Veste holds data for, spanning from 2013-04-04 to 2026-06-29, there have been 25,670 such decisions, of which 8,250 were fully upheld, 3,146 partially upheld and 14,274 not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 38.3%. That headline figure sits above the uphold rate recorded in the most recent 90-day window, which points to a market that has moved away from its long-run average, at least for now.
The numbers behind the fall
The period comparison is unambiguous in direction, if not necessarily in cause. Decision volume fell by more than a third and the uphold rate fell by 9.0 percentage points in the same window. Statistically, this is a large enough sample on both sides to say the change is unlikely to be pure noise in the sense of being driven by one or two decisions. Whether it reflects a genuine shift in how claims are being decided, a change in the mix of firms or claim types reaching the ombudsman, or something else in how cases are queued and published, the data alone cannot say.
The monthly trend series, running from 2024-06-01 to 2026-06-01 across trend_monthly_months of 25 months, gives more texture. Uphold rates across that run have ranged widely, from a low of 20.6% in April 2026 up to 48.4% in October 2024. The general pattern through 2024 saw uphold rates mostly in the high 30s to high 40s percentage range: 40.2% in July 2024, 41.3% in August 2024, 45.2% in September 2024, 48.4% in October 2024, 39.3% in November 2024 and 40.5% in December 2024. Through 2025 the rate drifted down somewhat, sitting at 39.2% in January 2025, 33.2% in February 2025, 41.2% in March 2025, 44.1% in April 2025, 38.5% in May 2025 and 42.4% in June 2025.
The more pronounced decline shows up from late 2025 into 2026. October 2025 recorded a 35.0% uphold rate, November 2025 rose to 44.2%, but December 2025 fell to 34.0%. January 2026 dropped further to 31.1%, February 2026 to 34.7%, March 2026 to 32.5%, and then the sharpest falls came in the final months of the series: April 2026 at 20.6%, May 2026 at 25.8% and June 2026 at 25.0%. Volume in these months has also varied, from 136 decisions in April 2026 to 328 in March 2026 and 194 in June 2026.
This monthly detail matters because it shows the fall captured in the 90-day period comparison is not confined to the most recent quarter alone. The uphold rate had already begun softening through the second half of 2025, well before the sharpest monthly readings of 20.6% and 25.8% in April and May 2026. That undercuts any reading of the period-on-period fall as a single abrupt event; it looks more like the tail end of a longer, gradual movement.
The annual picture
Year-on-year figures reinforce the same direction of travel. In 2023, the uphold rate for home insurance claim disputes stood at 45.2% across 2,519 decisions. In 2024 it was 43.9% across 2,355 decisions. In 2025 it fell to 39.3% across 2,387 decisions. Data for 2026 so far, covering 1,233 decisions, shows an uphold rate of 29.5%. Notably, 2022 sat lower still at 35.9% across 2,377 decisions, so the pattern is not simply one of steady year-on-year decline since the corpus began; 2023 and 2024 were higher years relative to both 2022 and 2025/2026. All five years listed meet Veste's minimum sample threshold, so each annual figure can be compared with reasonable confidence, though what happens for the remainder of 2026 is of course still unknown at the point of writing.
Firm mix and what it can and cannot tell us
Across the ten firms with the largest volumes of home insurance claim decisions in Veste's data, uphold rates vary considerably. Aviva Insurance Limited recorded 1,682 decisions with an uphold rate of 31.0%. AXA Insurance UK Plc recorded 1,583 decisions at 37.7%. Ageas Insurance Limited recorded 1,306 decisions at 42.8%, the highest uphold rate among this group. UK Insurance Limited recorded 1,228 decisions at 39.9%. Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Plc recorded 1,029 decisions at 35.2%, while a separately listed entity, Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Limited, recorded 644 decisions at 35.3%. U K Insurance Limited, a separate entry from UK Insurance Limited, recorded 952 decisions at 30.0%. Lloyds Bank General Insurance Limited recorded 729 decisions at 26.6%, the lowest uphold rate among the top ten. Liverpool Victoria Insurance Company Limited recorded 674 decisions at 36.3%, and Admiral Insurance (Gibraltar) Limited recorded 583 decisions at 43.1%.
It is worth noting explicitly that firms are counted in this data by the exact business name recorded on each published decision. UK Insurance Limited and U K Insurance Limited appear as separate entries, as do the two Royal & Sun Alliance entities, because subsidiaries of the same banking or insurance group are not rolled up into a single parent figure. This is a data structure point, not a claim about corporate relationships, and readers comparing these figures to other sources should bear it in mind.
Veste's evidence does not include a firm-by-firm breakdown of the two 90-day comparison windows, so it is not possible to say from this data which firms, if any, drove the overall fall in uphold rate or volume. The annual and monthly aggregate movements described above cannot be attributed to any single business on the basis of the figures supplied.
Individual decisions as illustration
Four published decisions from 2026-06-29, the most recent date in the examples supplied, illustrate the kinds of disputes that make up this category, though none should be read as representative of a trend on their own.
In one case, Advantage Insurance Company Limited declined a claim after Mr and Mrs H sought cover for conservatory damage they attributed to snow during a named storm in January 2026. The ombudsman found the recorded snowfall did not meet the policy's own definition of a snow storm, and that surveyor evidence pointed to pre-existing deterioration rather than storm damage as the underlying cause. The complaint was not upheld.
In a second case involving Admiral Insurance (Gibraltar) Limited, a motor insurance dispute, Admiral had already paid £350 in compensation for service failures including inconsistent communication and delays. The ombudsman found the firm's insistence on an independent vehicle assessment was reasonable given the limitations of reports submitted by the complainant's own garage, and did not extend the compensation beyond the sum already paid.
A third decision concerned Chubb European Group SE and a travel insurance claim following a flight cancellation linked to regional flight suspensions. The ombudsman found the policy's specific listed insured events did not cover the circumstances, and that a war exclusion reasonably applied given the reported hostilities. The complaint was not upheld.
A fourth decision involved the National House-Building Council (NHBC) and a buildings insurance and warranty dispute, where Mr and Mrs N had been paid 75% of repair costs for flat roof damage, with the remaining 25% withheld due to a commercial unit's separate policy exclusion. The ombudsman found NHBC's apportionment based on service charge proportions was fair and reasonable, and could not consider the terms of a policy to which the complainants were not party. This complaint was also not upheld.
All four of these illustrative decisions ended in not-upheld outcomes, but four cases from a single publication date cannot be used to characterise the broader uphold-rate trend described above; they are included here to show the texture of disputes within this claim category, not as evidence of a pattern.
Where home insurance sits against other products
Among related product categories in Veste's data, home insurance overall (a broader category than the claim-dispute subject examined here) records 10,866 decisions at a 38.7% uphold rate. Motor insurance stands at 3,493 decisions with a 41.3% uphold rate, travel insurance at 1,881 decisions with 42.3%, and GAP/warranty insurance, a smaller category, at 295 decisions with the highest uphold rate among these groups at 48.0%. Life and income protection sits lower, at 391 decisions and a 25.7% uphold rate, while PPI, now a much smaller category, records 81 decisions at 25.3%. Against the corpus-wide baseline uphold rate of 28.8% across 403,326 decisions with an outcome, home insurance claim disputes as a category still runs above the baseline over the full historical period, even though the most recent 90-day window has fallen well below it.
What the data does and does not show
The data demonstrates that decision volume and uphold rate for home insurance claim disputes have both fallen in the most recent 90-day window compared with the prior one, that this sits within a broader softening trend visible across the monthly series since late 2025, and that the annual figures for 2025 and the partial year 2026 are lower than 2023 and 2024. It does not demonstrate why this has happened. Veste's evidence does not include information on complaint intake volumes at the Financial Ombudsman, changes in how firms are handling claims, weather-related claim patterns, or any policy or regulatory change that might explain the shift. The population analysed is published Ombudsman decisions, which represent a subset of all complaints made to firms and are not a full record of underlying claims activity or customer experience.
The takeaway
For professionals monitoring this category, the useful signal from this data is not the single 90-day comparison in isolation, which on its own might be dismissed as short-term variation, but the fact that the monthly series shows a consistent softening trend running back through late 2025, corroborated by the annual figures showing 2025 and 2026 uphold rates below both 2023 and 2024. That combination of evidence, spanning several independent comparison windows, makes the recent fall harder to dismiss as noise, even though the precise cause remains outside what this dataset can establish.