Goods in Transit Insurance

Goods in transit insurance covers the items you are carrying if they are lost, stolen or damaged while in your vehicle or being loaded and unloaded. It protects the cargo. Your motor policy protects the vehicle. They are two different things, and one of the most expensive mistakes in this trade is assuming otherwise.

It applies whether the goods belong to a customer, to a client whose contract you are working under, or to your own business. If a van is broken into overnight and the load goes, this is the policy that responds.

We arrange goods in transit alongside courier and van hire and reward motor cover, so the load and the vehicle are looked at together on one call rather than bought separately and left with a gap between them.

No. Unlike motor insurance, goods in transit cover is not required by law, and any page telling you otherwise is wrong. What makes it near-unavoidable in practice is the contract: delivery networks, commercial clients and removal customers routinely specify a minimum limit before they will let you carry for them.

So the honest position is that most working couriers do need it — but the obligation comes from who you work for, not from legislation. Read your contracts first. They will tell you the limit you need, which is the question this page cannot answer for you.

Hire and reward is motor insurance. It makes it legal to use your vehicle to carry goods for payment, and it covers the vehicle and your liability to other people. Goods in transit covers the load. Neither includes the other, and you can hold one while being completely exposed on the other.

Put concretely: a courier with a valid hire and reward policy whose van is emptied overnight has cover for the van and nothing for the parcels. A courier with goods in transit but no hire and reward is driving illegally, and the motor claim fails too. You generally need both — see hire and reward insurance for how the motor side works.

No, and the difference can be the difference between a claim paid in full and a claim paid at a fraction of the value.

Goods in transit typically covers loss of or damage to the goods up to the sum insured, whether or not you were at fault. Carriers' liability covers only what you are legally liable for under your trading conditions — RHA or CMR terms, for example — and those conditions usually cap liability by the weight of the consignment rather than its value. A pallet of electronics weighs very little and is worth a great deal, so a weight-based cap can fall far short.

Check which one your client contract actually requires before you buy, and tell us what it says. The wording matters more than the label on the product.

Work from the maximum value you could be carrying on one vehicle at one time, not from an average load. A multi-drop driver at the start of a round is carrying the whole day's parcels; by mid-afternoon they are carrying very little. The limit has to cover the worst moment, not the typical one.

Then check whether any client contract sets a higher minimum, because that becomes your floor regardless of what you actually carry. Cover is usually written as a limit per vehicle, sometimes with a separate limit for any one transit.

If you are new to courier work and still working out which policies you need, what insurance you need to be a courier walks through the whole set in order.

Under-insuring is a false economy. If the sum insured sits below the value being carried, a claim can be reduced proportionately — so a policy bought to save money can pay out a fraction of the loss at exactly the wrong moment.