Is an EV dearer to insure?

The folklore says electric cars are dear to insure, and for a few years they were. The picture has moved. Confused.com worked out its average comprehensive premium for March to May 2026 at £607 for an electric car, £733 for petrol and £732 for diesel. That's a gap of £126 in the EV's favour.

Two things to keep in mind before you cheer. It's an average of the people who bought through one site, so it says as much about who drives an EV (older, suburban, a driveway, a clean record) as about the car. And the average hides an enormous spread: the same three months of Go.Compare sales put a Fiat 500 at a median £278 a year and a Porsche Taycan at £861. Against the ABI's whole-market average of £566 in the second quarter of 2026, a small EV is cheap and a big one is dear, which is true of petrol cars too.

So the answer for you is a quote for the exact car, not the average. Get it before the test drive, because it's a line on the running-cost bill that can swing £500 either way, and it's the easiest one to check.

An EV that gets hit costs more to put right, and that is what the premium is priced on. Thatcham Research, which sets the insurance groups, reported in July 2023 that battery-electric claims were about 25.5% more expensive than the petrol or diesel equivalent and took about 14% longer to repair. The reasons are the ones you'd guess: fewer body shops trained for high-voltage work, dearer parts, and a car that's often heavier and made of aluminium and composites rather than steel.

The battery is the real problem. In its March 2026 blueprint Thatcham says batteries account for up to 40% of a vehicle's total value, so even minor damage to the pack can turn a repairable car into a write-off, and battery issues were the first concern of 44.6% of insurers it surveyed. The same release has the good news: repair costs for EVs have fallen 10.7% as body shops get used to them, and that is why the premium gap has closed since 2023.

For scale, the ABI puts the average motor claim at £4,900 in the second quarter of 2026, up 4% on the quarter, with cameras, sensors and driver-assistance kit blamed across every kind of car. An EV has all of that plus a battery. The cost is real; it's just no longer unique to electric cars.

Which? asked Go.Compare to rank the EVs its customers actually insured between January and March 2026, by the median premium paid. The table below has the top of that list. The pattern is size and price: the cheapest ten are all superminis and small hatchbacks, and the dearest three are a Porsche Taycan at £861, a Porsche Macan at £837 and a Tesla Model X at £785.

Insurance groups tell the same story before you get a quote. On cinch's list the smart EQ forfour is group 9, the Renault Zoe group 14 and the Volkswagen ID.3 group 18, while Confused.com lists the Nissan Leaf at 21 to 28, the Skoda Enyaq at 22 to 38 and a Tesla Model S at group 50, the top of the scale. A group under 20 is cheap for any car; a group in the 40s is a performance-car premium whatever fuel it runs on.

If insurance is the line that decides it for you, a Renault 5 or a Corsa Electric at about £350 a year is the answer, and the Renault 5 comparison and the Corsa comparison put that next to the rest of the bill.

• Quote the exact car first. Trim, battery size and options move the group. A long-range or performance version of the same EV can be ten groups higher than the base one.
• Tell them where it sleeps. A driveway or a garage is cheaper than the street. So is a low annual mileage, and most EV drivers do fewer miles than they guess: check your last MOT.
• Raise the voluntary excess to what you could pay tomorrow. Not a penny more, because a battery claim is the one you'll actually make.
• Pay annually. Monthly instalments carry interest. If you must pay monthly, a 0% card is usually cheaper than the insurer's plan.
• Check what's covered before the price. The battery, the charging cable, a home charger and roadside recovery to a charger are the EV lines; a cheap policy that leaves one out isn't cheap.
• Compare at renewal, every year. The market for EVs is moving fast: the 2026 premiums above are well below what the same cars cost to cover in 2023, and next year's will be different again.

The 2023 gap was an information problem as much as an engineering one. Insurers had few claims to price from, so they priced for the worst case. Three years on there are more high-voltage-trained technicians, the battery-repair blueprint Thatcham published in March 2026 is aimed at stopping avoidable write-offs, and repair costs are already down a tenth. Every one of those pushes premiums the right way.

What could push them back is a bad year for battery fires or a run of expensive write-offs on one popular model, and you'll see that in the groups before you see it in your renewal. For now, insurance is one of the few running-cost lines where the EV is quietly ahead, and it's the one line people still assume goes the other way. The value it loses and the tax are where the surprises are.