Someone has caught your door in a car park, or a bramble has run the length of your wing. The first question most people ask is whether to put it through insurance. For minor cosmetic damage the answer is usually no — but it is worth understanding why, rather than taking our word for it.
Start with the excess
Every policy has an excess: the first slice of any claim that you pay yourself, no matter who was at fault. On a lot of policies that figure sits in the same territory as a small cosmetic repair. If it does, a claim means paying most of the bill anyway and having a claim on your record.
Check your policy schedule for the total — compulsory plus any voluntary excess you agreed to bring the premium down. People often forget they raised it.
Then the no-claims discount
Years of claim-free driving earn you a discount on your premium. Make a fault claim and insurers typically step that discount back — you lose some of the years you have built up, and the discount applied at renewal shrinks. How many years you lose depends on the insurer.
Two things catch people out here:
- "Fault" does not mean you were to blame. If nobody can be recovered from — an unknown car in a car park, for example — insurers usually treat it as a fault claim, because they are paying out with no one to reclaim from.
- Protected no-claims is not the same as no consequences. Protection stops the discount being stepped back. It does not remove the claim from your record, and your premium is calculated from that record before any discount is applied.
The claim follows you either way
Insurers ask about incidents and claims over the past several years, and they ask at renewal and when you move to a new insurer. Premiums are priced on risk, and a claims history is part of that picture.
What we cannot tell you is how much difference it makes. That depends on the insurer, the car, your history and how they weigh it — and anyone quoting you a precise figure for it is guessing. What is predictable is the direction: a claim does not make your future premiums cheaper.
When claiming is the sensible move
Insurance exists for a reason, and there are plenty of cases where using it is obviously right:
- Structural or crash damage, or damage across several panels, where the repair cost is far above your excess.
- Anything involving another vehicle, a third party or an injury — that needs reporting regardless of who pays for the paint.
- Where someone else was at fault, they are identified and their insurer is picking up the cost. Handled that way, a claim should not touch your own discount — though it will still show on your record.
The trade-off, plainly
Paying directly is one cost, once, with no excess, no paperwork and nothing added to your record. Claiming spreads the cost of a repair you could not otherwise absorb, but you carry the excess and the claim with you.
For small cosmetic damage the two sums are often close enough that the record is the deciding factor rather than the money. For serious damage it is not close at all, and you should claim.
The order to do this in is simple: get a figure for the repair, check your excess and your no-claims terms, then compare the two. It is a five-minute job and it beats guessing.
Worth saying: we repair paintwork, we are not insurance advisers. Your policy documents and your insurer are the authority on your excess, your no-claims discount and what you are obliged to report. If you are unsure whether an incident needs declaring, ask them — not us.