Every Electric Car Now Costs £46 More to Insure than Petrol, MoneySuperMarket Finds

• Electric cars now cost £552 a year to insure on average, £46 more than petrol cars and £20 more than diesel, according to new comparison site data covering June to August 2026.
• The gap has reversed in two years: electric cars were about £45 a year cheaper to insure than petrol equivalents back in 2024.
• Thatcham Research says battery repairs cost 25 percent more than petrol repairs and take 14 percent longer, and one in five electric cars is written off after damage that would be a simple repair on a petrol car.

The Car That Was Supposed to Save You Money Is Now Costing You More

Drivers who switched to electric expecting cheaper bills are getting a different number at renewal. MoneySuperMarket’s Electric Car Insurance Index, built from the median price of fully-comp policies sold through the site between June and August 2026, puts the average annual premium for an electric car at £552. A petrol car costs £506 to insure over the same period, and diesel sits at £532. That makes electric cars nine percent more expensive to cover than petrol and about four percent more than diesel, the two fuel types electric vehicles were meant to replace.

A separate analysis by consultancy Brumble, using Association of British Insurers and Department for Transport figures from May 2026, puts the average electric premium closer to £654 a year against £551 to £607 for petrol and diesel. The exact gap moves depending on which policies and vehicles are compared, but every dataset published this year points the same way: electric cars now cost more to insure than the cars they are replacing, not less.

Why Your Battery Is the Reason Your Premium Went Up

The price difference traces back to what sits under the floor of every electric car. Thatcham Research, the insurance industry’s crash and repair body, says the high voltage battery pack accounts for 30 to 50 percent of a car’s total value, and a replacement pack costs between £14,200 and £29,500 depending on the model. On a mid-range family electric car worth £30,000, a battery that needs replacing after one year of ownership can cost more than the car itself.

That single fact changes how insurers treat even minor crashes. Thatcham’s data shows electric repairs cost 25 percent more than equivalent petrol repairs and take 14 percent longer to complete. A damaged battery cannot simply be inspected and patched: any car with suspected battery damage has to sit isolated for at least 48 hours before a repairer can touch it, a quarantine rule that Thatcham says adds a minimum of £60 to every claim before a single part is ordered. Batteries also need specialist storage space. A yard that could hold 100 damaged petrol cars can safely quarantine only two electric ones, a capacity drop of 98 percent that pushes up storage costs across the whole repair network.

There are not enough technicians to absorb that extra work either. The Institute of the Motor Industry says only about one in five UK garage technicians is currently qualified to work on high voltage systems, and the sector reported more than 23,000 unfilled aftermarket vacancies. Consultancy FWD estimates the knock-on effect at more than £461 million a year in write-off costs across UK businesses, much of it from electric cars scrapped after damage a petrol car would have driven away from. Jonathan Hewett, chief executive of Thatcham Research, has warned that the switch to electric “cannot succeed if EVs become economically unviable to insure and repair.” Martin Hall, managing director at insurer ERS, put the pricing logic more bluntly: “If the cost of claims goes up, premiums need to go up to counterbalance it.”

The Models Pulling the Average Up, and the Ones Keeping It Down

Not every electric car carries the same penalty. MoneySuperMarket’s model-by-model figures, covering sales between January and May 2026 with a minimum of 100 policies per car, show the Jaguar I-Pace 400 SE as the most expensive new electric car to insure at £921.59 a year. Tesla fills most of the rest of the expensive list: the Model Y Long Range all wheel drive averages £895.76, the Model Y Standard Range £878.14, and the Model 3 Standard Range Plus £868.37. The Mercedes-Benz EQC, BYD Seal, Audi E-Tron and Leapmotor C10 all sit above £800.

At the other end, the Renault R5 averages just £417.64 a year, the cheapest electric car on the list, followed by the MINI Cooper S at £445.58 and the Volkswagen ID.3 Life at £477.81. The Nissan Leaf, in both Tekna and E+ Tekna trim, insures for under £516. The pattern holds beyond this one index. Brumble’s analysis found the premium gap between electric and petrol has closed entirely for smaller, high-volume models including the Nissan Leaf, MG4 and Dacia Spring, even as it widens for performance and premium electric cars. Separate figures from the AA, published by Auto Express, show an electric Vauxhall Corsa actually costing slightly less to insure than its petrol twin, while an electric BMW i4 costs over £800 more a year than the petrol 4 Series it is based on.

It Was Not Always Like This

The direction of travel is what makes this figure sting. Data supplied to EV Powered by comparison site Go.Compare in 2024 showed the reverse: electric cars averaged £832 for full cover against £877 for petrol, making electric the cheaper fuel type to insure by £45. Go.Compare’s own four year tracking found average electric premiums rose 50.7 percent over that period while petrol premiums rose even faster, by 67 percent, briefly pushing petrol above electric in October 2023 for the first time. Tom Banks, a car insurance expert at Go.Compare, described electric cover at the time as “now around £45 cheaper” than petrol. Two years on, that gap has not just closed. It has swung the other way by roughly £90 to £100 depending on which index is used, and the models driving it, heavier, faster, premium electric cars with expensive batteries, are exactly the ones insurers say cost the most to repair.

What You Can Actually Do About It

The size of the premium gap depends heavily on which car you choose, so the most effective fix happens before you buy rather than at renewal. Checking a model’s insurance group before ordering is free and takes minutes on comparison sites, and the gap between cheap and expensive electric cars is far wider than the gap between electric and petrol. A Renault R5 at £417.64 costs roughly a quarter of what a Jaguar I-Pace costs to cover, a bigger swing than any fuel-type penalty.

If you already own an electric car, get quotes for both the electric and petrol or hybrid version of the same model before you renew, as the AA and Auto Express figures show that gap varies from nothing to several hundred pounds depending on the car. Ask your insurer directly whether they use an approved high voltage repair network. A repairer without battery-safe diagnostic equipment is more likely to write a car off after a minor knock rather than repair it, and that write-off risk is priced into your premium. Fitting a Thatcham-approved tracker or immobiliser can lower the risk score insurers apply to higher-value electric cars, and some insurers offer discounts for home charging setups that reduce breakdown call-outs. None of these steps make an electric car as cheap to insure as the smallest petrol runabout, but they can meaningfully close the gap on everything except the most expensive performance models, where the battery size and repair bill make a lower premium unlikely regardless of who you insure with.

Running costs still tend to favour electric overall. Thatcham’s wider cost analysis, cited by Insurance Business UK, puts total running costs for electric cars at £500 to £1,000 a year less than petrol once fuel, servicing and road tax are included, even after the higher insurance premium is factored in. The insurance bill is simply the one part of owning an electric car that has moved against drivers this year, and it is worth checking before your current policy renews rather than after.

Sources:

• MoneySuperMarket: The Electric Car Insurance Index
• Insurance Business UK: Do electric cars cost too much to insure?
• Auto Express: Why EVs are so expensive to insure, and how to make them cheaper
• EV Powered: Electric car insurance now cheaper than petrol, and these are the cheapest EVs to insure