Dry rot
Is dry rot or woodworm covered by insurance?
The honest answer, before the detail: buildings insurance will almost certainly not pay to treat your rot or your woodworm. It may well pay to fix the thing that caused it, and it may pay for a substantial part of the damage that followed. Those are different claims, and knowing which one you are making is the difference between a payout and a refusal.
This is general information rather than advice on your policy. Every insurer words this differently, and the only document that answers your question is your own policy booklet, in the section on exclusions.
The exclusion that decides most of it
Nearly every UK buildings policy excludes what it calls gradual damage: deterioration that happens slowly, over time, through wear, damp, condensation, or lack of maintenance. The Association of British Insurers lists general wear and tear, and damage arising from lack of maintenance, among the things a home policy will not usually cover at all. The Financial Ombudsman Service calls the clause a “gradually operating cause” exclusion, which is the phrase to look for in your own wording.
Rot and woodworm sit squarely inside that description. Timber decay takes months or years, which is exactly what the exclusion is written to leave out.
Insurance is designed for the sudden and the unforeseen. A pipe that bursts on a Tuesday is sudden. A gutter that has been overflowing quietly since 2019 is not, and neither is the wet rot in the wall behind it.
So the question is almost never “is dry rot covered”. It is: was there a single, sudden, insured event that started this, and can you show it?
The part most people are never told
If a claim is declined on that exclusion, the burden of proof is not yours. The ombudsman’s published approach is that where a firm relies on an exclusion to turn down a claim, it is the firm’s responsibility to prove the exclusion applies. It also says outright that it will not accept a customer has been treated fairly simply because the insurer pointed at an exclusion, and that it expects to see expert reports and photographs of the damage when it weighs up what actually caused it.
None of that turns a weak claim into a strong one. A gutter nobody cleared is still a gutter nobody cleared. What it does mean is that a two-line refusal naming gradual damage, with no reasoning and no inspection behind it, is not the end of the conversation, and a specialist report of your own is the thing that reopens it.
The claims that do get paid
Four routes turn up repeatedly.
Escape of water. A burst pipe, a failed washing machine hose, a leaking heating circuit, an overflowing tank. This is a named peril in essentially every policy, and it is the most common successful route into a rot claim. The insurer pays to repair the leak and to put right the damage the escaping water caused. If wet rot in a joist is a direct consequence of that burst pipe, it forms part of the claim.
Storm damage. A slate off in a gale, a chimney down, a gutter torn away. The storm damage itself is covered, and the water that got in during the storm usually follows it. Where this gets argued is when the roof was already in poor repair, because the insurer will say the storm exposed a maintenance problem rather than caused a new one. Worth knowing that the ombudsman’s working definition of a storm is wider than most people assume: violent wind usually accompanied by rain, hail or snow, but it accepts that rain, hail or snowfall on its own can amount to one.
Accidental damage, if you have it. Optional on most policies. A nail through a pipe during a bathroom refit is the classic.
Trace and access. This is the clause worth knowing about and the one people miss. It covers the cost of lifting floors, removing panelling and opening up walls to find a leak, and then making good afterwards. Because finding rot means opening up anyway, trace and access frequently pays for a good share of the disruption even when it will not pay for the treatment.
A concession that will save you a phone call. If your rot has no sudden event behind it, and it came from a slow leak, a blocked airbrick, poor ventilation or a gutter nobody has cleared in a decade, a claim is very unlikely to succeed and pursuing it can cost you more than it returns. Claims sit on your record for years and affect what you pay afterwards, whether or not they are paid out. For a small wet rot repair, paying for it yourself and not troubling the insurer is often the better arithmetic. We would rather tell you that than watch you spend six weeks finding out.
Woodworm specifically, and why it is the hardest of the three
Woodworm is worse placed than rot for a claim, for a simple reason: most policies also carry an explicit exclusion for damage caused by insects, vermin or infestation. So woodworm can fail on two separate grounds at once, gradual damage and infestation, and insurers are quick to point at both.
The realistic position is that treatment for common furniture beetle is not an insurance matter. The good news is that it is also one of the cheaper jobs in this trade, which is set out on woodworm treatment cost, and that most woodworm found in Scottish houses turns out to be historic and to need nothing at all.
Where woodworm can still enter a claim is indirectly. If a burst pipe soaked a floor, and that damp floor then developed both wet rot and an active infestation, the water is the insured event and the timber repair follows from it. You are claiming for water damage to a floor, not for beetles.
Dry rot, and the argument you will have
Dry rot is where insurers push back hardest, and it is worth understanding why so you can answer it.
Serpula lacrymans needs around twenty per cent timber moisture to establish, then sustains itself by conducting water along its own strands, which is what lets it spread through masonry away from where it started. An insurer’s loss adjuster knows this. The argument they make is that the fungus had to have been established for a long period before it reached the state you are now claiming for, which puts it inside the gradual damage exclusion regardless of what happened last month.
Countering that means showing a clear, dated, sudden event and a direct line from it to the damage. Where people succeed, it is usually because they had a documented escape of water, reported promptly, with a specialist report that explicitly connects the outbreak to that source. Where people fail, it is usually because the report says the cause was a long-standing defect.
That single sentence in the report is what the whole claim turns on, which is why the report matters more than the phone call.
How to claim properly
- Report it as soon as you find it. Delay is the most common reason a claim is reduced or refused, because policies require prompt notification and delay lets the damage worsen at the insurer's expense.
- Stop the water first. You are obliged to prevent further damage. Turn it off, get the emergency plumber, keep the invoice, because that invoice is also dated evidence of a sudden event.
- Photograph everything before anybody touches it. The failed joint, the stain, the affected timber, the room. Time-stamped photographs are worth more than description.
- Do not authorise treatment before the insurer has seen it. Repairing the damage before it has been inspected is the second most common reason claims fail.
- Get an independent specialist report. Insurers appoint their own people. A report of your own, naming the cause and the extent, is what you argue with if you disagree.
- Read the exclusions before the summary. The policy summary tells you what is covered. The exclusions tell you what actually happens.
If a claim is declined and you think that is wrong, insurers have a complaints procedure, and beyond that the Financial Ombudsman Service considers complaints about insurers for free. Go to the insurer’s own complaints process first, because the ombudsman only looks at complaints the firm has had a chance to answer. That route takes months rather than weeks, which matters if the timber is getting worse while you wait.
Guarantees are not insurance, and the difference matters
People conflate these constantly. A treatment guarantee is a promise from the firm that did the work, that if the treated timber fails within the guarantee period they will come back and put it right. It covers their work. It does not cover a new outbreak somewhere else, and it is worth exactly as much as the firm behind it.
That is why insurance-backed guarantees exist: a third party underwrites the promise so it survives the firm going out of business. If you are buying or selling, this is the part a solicitor will ask about, because a guarantee is only useful to the next owner if it can be assigned to them. What we cover and for how long is on our guarantee.
In a house purchase, none of this is your claim
Worth stating clearly, because it comes up. If you are buying a property that has rot, the insured event, if there was one, happened on the seller’s watch and under the seller’s policy. Your own policy starts at your date of entry and will not cover a defect that pre-existed it. Any insurer would treat that as a known condition.
So the route in a purchase is not insurance. It is a written specialist report, and then a price negotiation or the work done before entry. There is more on that in buying a house with dry rot.
What to do next
If there has been a sudden leak, tell your insurer today and get photographs before anything is lifted. If there has not, the claim is unlikely and the useful next step is finding out what you are actually dealing with and what it costs.
A timber survey gives you a written report naming the cause, the extent and the work needed, which is the document that serves every one of these situations: the insurer, the solicitor, the lender, or just you deciding whether to spend the money.
Questions people ask
Does home insurance cover dry rot?
Not the rot itself, in almost every case. Insurers treat timber decay as gradual deterioration, and gradual deterioration is excluded from standard buildings cover. What a policy can pay for is a sudden insured event that caused the rot, such as a burst pipe, along with the damage that followed from it. So the useful question is not whether dry rot is covered but whether something sudden and insured started it.
Does home insurance cover rotten wood?
The same rule applies whatever the timber and whichever rot it is. Rotten joists, floorboards, window frames and roof timbers are all read as decay that developed over months or years, which sits inside the wear, damp and maintenance exclusions. Where rotten wood does get paid for, it is being paid for as water damage from an event, not as rot.
Is woodworm covered by insurance?
Woodworm is the hardest of the three to claim for, because most policies exclude insects, vermin and infestation on top of excluding gradual damage. An insurer can therefore decline on two separate grounds at once. Woodworm treatment is usually cheap enough that this matters less than it sounds, and a lot of the woodworm found in Scottish houses turns out to be long dead.
Can I claim for dry rot caused by a burst pipe?
This is the strongest version of the claim, and it does succeed. You are claiming for escape of water, which is a named peril, and the rot forms part of the damage that peril caused. It needs a dated event, prompt notification, and a specialist report that connects the outbreak to that specific leak rather than to a long standing defect.
Who has to prove the gradual damage exclusion applies?
The insurer does. The Financial Ombudsman Service is explicit that where a firm relies on an exclusion to decline a claim, the burden of showing the exclusion applies sits with the firm. It also says it will not accept that a customer has been treated fairly simply because an exclusion was quoted at them. A refusal letter that names gradual damage and reasons no further has not finished the job.
Will making a claim affect what I pay afterwards?
Usually yes, and it does so whether or not the claim is paid. Claims and notified incidents stay on your record for years and are asked about at renewal and when you switch insurer. For a small wet rot repair the increase across those years can exceed what the repair would have cost, which is worth working out before you pick up the phone.