Why Parking in a Garage Could Add £54 to Your Car Insurance Bill

Locking your car in a garage overnight feels like the responsible thing to do. It is out of sight, off the road and away from prowling thieves. So it comes as a shock to many drivers to learn that a garage can actually push their car insurance up, not down. Fresh figures from Go.Compare show that motorists who keep their car in a garage overnight pay more on average than those who leave it on a driveway or in the street, and on one common type of policy the gap runs to £54 a year.

It is a quirk of the way insurers price risk in 2026, and it catches out drivers who assume the safest looking option is always the cheapest. Here is what the data actually says, why it happens, and how to make sure your overnight parking answer is working for you rather than against you.

The numbers behind the garage penalty

According to Go.Compare data reported at the start of June, drivers who park in a garage overnight pay around £647 for the most complete level of cover. Those who keep their car elsewhere overnight pay about £623. That is a difference of £24 a year for choosing what looks like the more secure spot.

The gap widens sharply on cheaper policy types. On third party only cover, the cheapest legal level of protection, garage parkers face costs of around £790, which is £54 more than the average for that policy type. Drivers who park somewhere other than a garage pay closer to £736 for the same level of cover, the single largest difference of any policy type in the study. Third party fire and theft policies followed the same pattern, costing garage parkers roughly £17 more a year.

Tom Banks, a spokesperson at Go.Compare, summed up the surprise. “Car insurance is often cheaper for those who park in more secure locations, so it might be a surprise to see that those who park in a garage actually end up with higher costs on average,” he said.

It is worth keeping these figures in proportion. They are averages across many thousands of quotes, not a fixed surcharge that will appear on every policy. For some drivers a garage will still produce the cheapest quote. The point is that “garage equals discount” is no longer a safe assumption, and it pays to test it.

Why a safer spot can cost more

The explanation comes down to the kind of claims insurers are now seeing, and the cars people are trying to squeeze into their garages. Banks pointed to the steady rise in the size of new cars, and the dramatic growth in SUV sales, as a likely driver. Many garages were built decades ago for smaller vehicles. Manoeuvring a wide modern crossover through a narrow doorway, often in poor light, is a recipe for kerbed alloys, scuffed bumpers and scraped door mirrors.

Those low speed knocks turn into claims, and insurers appear to be paying out on a greater share of them for cars kept in garages. Because premiums are priced on the likelihood and cost of a future claim, a parking spot that produces more minor damage can end up costing more to insure than one that does not, even if it is more secure against theft.

There is also a behavioural shift behind the figures. Go.Compare found that almost a fifth of people living in a home with a garage have converted that space in the last five years, turning it into a home gym, a utility room or a home office rather than a place to keep the car. The most common conversions were home gyms at 38 per cent, utility rooms at 24 per cent and home offices at 23 per cent. Fewer cars in garages means a smaller, and possibly less typical, pool of drivers declaring that option, which can affect how the risk is priced. The number of policies for cars parked in a locked garage overnight fell by three per cent between 2023 and 2025.

For context, the driveway remains the most common overnight spot, used by almost two thirds of drivers, while around one in five admit to leaving their car on the road outside their home. The cost of cover has been moving in several directions at once this year, with some groups seeing relief and others paying more. Younger motorists, for example, have seen some of the steepest falls, as we covered in our look at why young drivers are paying the lowest car insurance in a decade.

Should you change where you park?

Tempting as it is to move your car onto the driveway to shave £24 off a renewal, the experts behind the data urge caution. A small saving on the premium can be wiped out many times over by a single claim, and where you park has a much bigger effect on the odds of theft or serious damage than it does on the price of cover.

“While parking in a garage could lead to more expensive premiums, we’d still suggest that drivers prioritise their vehicle’s security when choosing where to leave their car overnight,” Banks said. He added that the added protection could save money in the long run, particularly if a car left on a driveway or the road is stolen. “If you have to claim, your premiums will likely go up as a result, meaning you could cancel out any savings you made by parking elsewhere in the first place.”

His conclusion was simple. “Ultimately, you should pick your parking spot based on where it’s least likely to be damaged or stolen. If that means leaving it in the garage, even if it results in a slight rise in your premiums, it could be the better option in the long run.”

One thing you must not do is fudge the answer. The overnight parking question is a material fact, and giving a false response to chase a cheaper price counts as misrepresentation. If you later need to claim, an insurer can reduce the payout or refuse it outright, and a cancelled policy for non disclosure can haunt future quotes for years. Always declare where the car is actually kept overnight.

What to do at your next renewal

Treat the parking field as a setting to test, not a fixed truth. When you compare quotes, run the exercise twice, once with your real overnight location and, if you really have a choice between a garage and a driveway, again with the alternative you could realistically use. Compare the premiums alongside the security trade off before you decide.

Shop around rather than auto renewing. The price gap between providers for the same risk is often far larger than the £24 to £54 garage difference, so a few minutes on a comparison site will usually save more than tweaking where you park. Start the process around three weeks before renewal, as quotes tend to be cheaper than buying at the last minute.

If you do keep the car in a garage, make sure your other security answers reflect it accurately, including any alarm, immobiliser or tracker, as these can pull the premium back down. And if your garage has quietly become a gym or a store room, be honest about it. Declaring a garage you no longer use for the car is exactly the kind of detail that can unravel a claim. For drivers weighing up the wider cost of running a car this year, it is also worth reading our guide to how electric cars cost more to insure than petrol equivalents before switching vehicles.

The factors that move your premium more

Useful as the parking finding is, it helps to keep it in context. Where you keep the car overnight is only one of many factors an insurer weighs, and several others pull far harder on the price. Your postcode, annual mileage, the car’s insurance group, your claims and convictions history and your job all feed into the quote, and a change to any of them tends to dwarf a £24 garage difference.

That is why the smart move is to attack the bigger levers first. Building up no claims years, paying annually rather than monthly to avoid interest, increasing a voluntary excess if you can afford it, and adding a responsible named driver can each save more than tinkering with the parking field. Telematics or black box policies are worth a look for lower mileage and newer drivers, and accurate mileage estimates count, because over stating how far you drive needlessly inflates the premium.

The garage figures are a reminder that car insurance pricing does not always follow common sense, and that assumptions can cost you. The only way to know what your own circumstances produce is to compare, declare everything accurately, and choose the parking option that truly protects your car rather than the one you assume is cheapest.

Sources:

• GB News: British homeowners face £790 car insurance bill for parking vehicles inside garages
• Go.Compare car insurance