How to Make a Contents Insurance Claim: The 3 Things You Must Prove

Having spent 25 years managing insurance claims, I've witnessed many tragedies but one of the most common is completely avoidable.

People seem to pay the same amount of care and attention to their contents insurance as they do to the safety video that plays just before their flight takes off. It's far easier and more comforting to believe that nothing bad is going to happen to you than to prepare for the possibility that it might.

And so they discover, only after the plane goes down, that they have no idea how to open the emergency exit or inflate their life vest, or in the context of insurance, they have no idea how they are going to document and prove everything they have now lost because it's gone.

When they eventually do start to pull a list together the next realisation hits home. They had nowhere near enough cover. By then, it's too late.

The Reality of Making a Valid Claim

Here's the reality worth understanding: to make a valid claim, you have to establish what's called a prima facie claim. That requires 3 things, and the burden is on you to prove them, not your insurer:

That you owned what you're claiming for
That an insured event actually occurred
The value of the items claimed

Prove those three, and the law flips the burden onto your insurer to either settle the claim or prove an exclusion applies. It's really that simple.

What Your Insurer Will Actually Ask You For

Every insurer words it differently, but after a contents loss the requests land in much the same order. Expect to be asked for:

A schedule of what was lost. Item by item: what it was, the make and model, roughly when you bought it, what you paid, and what it would cost to replace today. On a whole-of-house loss this can run to hundreds of lines, and you will be asked to complete it while you are living somewhere else.
Proof that you owned each item. See the next section — this is where most claims stall.
Proof the event happened. A police report number for a burglary, a fire brigade incident number, the date and nature of the storm. This one is usually straightforward.
Evidence of value. Receipts, statements, or current retail pricing for the equivalent item.
Your excess. Payable per claim, and it comes off the settlement.

The schedule is the part that breaks people. Not because it is difficult in isolation, but because you are being asked to remember the contents of every cupboard in a house you can no longer walk through.

What Counts as Proof of Ownership

This is the question I was asked more than any other. In practice, assessors will usually accept a combination of:

Receipts and tax invoices. The gold standard, and almost nobody has them for everything.
Bank and credit card statements. A line item on a statement won't say what you bought, but paired with a photo of the item it is usually persuasive. Statements are also retrievable after a fire, which paper receipts in a kitchen drawer are not.
Photographs of the item in your home. Particularly strong when the photo carries its own date and location data, and stronger again when the make, model or serial number is legible in the frame.
Warranty cards, registrations and app accounts. Appliances, phones, tools and consoles are often registered to you somewhere.
The original boxes, manuals or serial plates, if they survived.
Retailer purchase history. Many large Australian retailers can reissue a receipt from a loyalty account or card.
Statutory declarations. Accepted for lower-value items where nothing else exists, but you do not want your whole claim resting on them.

Notice the pattern: the documents that prove ownership best are the ones kept somewhere other than the house. That is the entire argument for doing this in advance, off-site.

How the Value Is Worked Out

Two settlement bases dominate Australian home contents policies, and the difference is enormous:

Replacement value, often sold as new for old — the cost of an equivalent new item today.
Indemnity value — the depreciated, second-hand worth of what you actually had.

Your sum insured then caps the lot. Most policies also apply sub-limits to particular categories — jewellery, watches, art, collectibles, cash, and anything kept outside the house — and items above a certain value often have to be specified individually before any loss, not after.

Two things are worth doing today, not on the worst day of your life: read the limits in your product disclosure statement, and total up what your contents would actually cost to replace. People are routinely out by a factor of two.

A Realistic Timeline

Lodgement, usually within hours of the event, by phone or app.
Emergency make-safe and temporary accommodation, if your policy includes it. Ask immediately; it is often capped by time, not just dollars.
An assessor is appointed for anything substantial, and you'll be asked for the schedule.
Scoping and negotiation — the back-and-forth over what's covered and at what value. This is the stage your documentation either shortens or stretches out.
Settlement, either as a cash payment, a replacement through the insurer's suppliers, or a mix.

If you disagree with the outcome, every Australian insurer must offer an internal dispute resolution process, and you can escalate free of charge to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. Insist on reasons in writing at every step.

Why Contents Claims Get Reduced

The five I saw most often:

Underinsurance. The sum insured was set years ago and never revisited.
No proof of ownership, so items are negotiated down or dropped entirely.
Category sub-limits the policyholder never knew existed.
Unspecified high-value items — the engagement ring claimed at its true worth, paid at the generic jewellery limit.
Memory. You simply cannot recall the contents of an entire home, and everything you forget is money you never claim.

In the First 48 Hours After a Loss

Report it and get a claim number.
Report theft or malicious damage to police and keep the event number.
Photograph the damage widely before anything is cleared, including the rubble.
Keep every damaged item you safely can until an assessor has seen it.
Keep receipts for emergency spending — many policies reimburse it.
Start the schedule immediately, while recall is sharpest, and work room by room rather than category by category.

Establish Your Prima Facie Case Before Disaster Strikes

I've watched too many people learn all this the hard way now and that's why I created VerifAEye.

VerifAEye does the hard work for you, so that in hardly any time at all, you have 2 of the 3 things needed to establish a prima facie claim, long before you ever need it. You photograph your things, the AI reads the detail an assessor would — make, model, condition, Australian replacement cost — and the date and place are stamped into the photo itself. The only other thing you need is an insured event to occur. VerifAEye can't help make that happen and I'm sure you're okay with that. If one day you do need to lodge a claim though, that's when you'll thank me, especially when you see how easy I've made that for you too.

If you are starting from scratch, read tips on putting together your contents inventory next — it covers the room-by-room method and what to photograph. The pricing page explains what is free, including the covering letter you send your insurer alongside your inventory.

Common Questions

How long do I have to lodge a contents claim? Report it as soon as you reasonably can. Policies require prompt notification, and delay gives an insurer grounds to argue that damage worsened or evidence was lost. Check the wording in your own PDS.

Can I claim without receipts? Usually, yes — but you must prove ownership some other way, and the weaker the evidence, the more negotiation you face. Photographs taken before the loss, paired with bank statements, do most of the work.

Does a home inventory have to be valued by a professional? Not for ordinary household contents. For specified items such as jewellery, art or collectibles, your insurer may require a current valuation before they will insure them for a stated amount.

Will making a claim increase my premium? It can, and claim history follows you between insurers. That is an argument for insuring accurately, not for under-claiming what you are owed.

Please remember to create your own inventory before helping others with theirs.

Thank you for your attention, please enjoy your flight.

The proof is in the detail. Start your inventory today.