Renters Insurance Calculator

Two halves, one policy

The property half pays toward your belongings — furniture, clothes, electronics, luggage — when they are damaged by a covered event or stolen, after the deductible and up to the coverage limit you choose. The liability half pays toward damages and legal costs for an accident you are responsible for, up to its own limit, per occurrence. This page prices both halves from the numbers on the quote, because the premium you are quoted already combines them.

The page prints the liability outcome at four sizes of judgment — half, one, two and five times the liability limit — so you can see exactly where the coverage runs out on a big claim. Each judgment pays up to the limit, no more, which is the part of a renters policy most quotes never show you.

The property arithmetic

Nothing is paid until a loss crosses the deductible, and the policy never pays more than its coverage limit: payment = loss − deductible, from $0 up to the limit. That is why the table on the page shows a small loss paying nothing, a medium loss paying the part above the deductible, and a very large loss paying no more than the limit no matter how the bill grows. The shape is the same for every policy; only the three numbers change.

The six-loss table runs from a $0 loss up to a $40,000 one, which brackets the real range a renter faces, and payment never dips below $0 even when the loss is smaller than the deductible. If the value of everything you own is more than the property limit you entered, the page flags you as under-insured — the single most useful warning on the whole screen.

The break-even loss is the honest question

Set the policy\u2019s yearly cost against what it pays and the arithmetic falls out: a single property claim hands the year\u2019s premiums back at the deductible plus the annual premium. On the sample policy on this page — $25 a month, a $1,000 deductible, $40,000 of property cover — that break-even is $1,300 of loss in a year. Below it, the policy has not paid back its premiums; above it, it has.

Most years it will not, which is the honest shape of all insurance, and in the year it does, it costs a great deal less than starting over. The break-even is only printed when that loss actually fits under the coverage limit, because beyond the limit the policy stops paying more regardless of how large the claim grows.

What no quote page can tell you

The two halves are the easy part of the contract. Whether the policy pays replacement cost or actual cash value — new-for-old, or used value with depreciation — is a decision worth more than the premium, because a five-year-old sofa is worth very different numbers under the two.

Many policies cap what they will pay for categories like jewelry, watches, cash or electronics no matter what the total limit says, and peril lists matter: open-perils policies cover everything except what they name, named-perils policies only what they list. This page prices the shape you see on the quote; the exclusions read like fine print for a reason.

None of those choices change the arithmetic here — the payment rule is the same deductible-then-limit shape — but they change how much of a real loss the policy actually hands back, which is why the price alone is never the whole story on a renters policy.