Insurance claim taking too long? Your rights on delays

Delay is the quietest way a home insurance claim goes wrong. No rejection letter, no argument, just weeks of "it's with the surveyor" while your house stays broken. It is also the complaint the ombudsman upholds more than any other. This page assembles, in one place, the rights that exist against delay and how to use them.

How long is too long?

There is no statutory number of days. A straightforward contents theft claim should settle in weeks; a major escape-of-water claim with stripping-out, drying and reinstatement can legitimately take months. The question the law asks is not "how long?" but "was every stage justified?", and that is where most insurers' timelines fall apart, because the elapsed time is mostly gaps: waiting for the adjuster's report to be read, waiting for someone to authorise what the surveyor recommended, waiting for a callback that never comes.

For context on scale: insurers paid out on more than 560,000 home insurance claims in 2025, according to the Association of British Insurers, and complaint volumes about buildings insurance hit a ten-year high of 7,321 in 2024/25 per the Financial Ombudsman Service, with delay one of the biggest drivers.

The three layers of rights against delay

Nobody publishes this stack in one place, so here it is:

The section 13A route matters mainly for serious consequential losses: you had to borrow expensively, a sale fell through, mould from the unrepaired leak wrecked more of the house. For most people the practical remedy runs through the complaint-and-ombudsman route below, which is free. Note the insurer has a defence under 13A where it had reasonable grounds to dispute the claim: delay while genuinely investigating is not a breach; drift is.

What a reasonable timeline looks like

"Reasonable time" is deliberately flexible, but a well-run domestic claim has a recognisable shape. Use this as the yardstick your own timeline is measured against:

A claim can honestly take months and still be handled promptly, because drying out a flooded house takes the time it takes. What the yardstick exposes is the other kind of claim: short bursts of activity separated by long administrative silences. Those silences are what you log, and what you complain about.

Start a delay log today

The evidence that wins delay disputes is boring and cumulative: a dated record of everything.

• every call and email: date, who, what was said;
• every promise ("the surveyor will attend within 10 days") and what actually happened;
• every period of silence, and your chasers;
• the running impact: rooms unusable, dehumidifier noise, time off work for visits that were cancelled.

Five minutes per event, kept from today even if the claim is young. When you later assert "fourteen weeks, of which nine were waiting for internal sign-off", the log is what makes that sentence undeniable.

Turn the delay into a complaint

Politeness has no deadline attached; a complaint does. When chasing has stopped working, write to the insurer and use the word complaint explicitly. That triggers the regulated process: the insurer must issue a final response letter within eight weeks. Our guide to complaining to your insurer covers the structure; for a delay complaint, the spine is your log (the timeline, the gaps, the broken promises) plus what you want: a decision, a payment, a date.

Here is why it is worth doing. Delay is the strongest ground a policyholder has:

• The FOS upheld 57% of complaints about delays in buildings insurance claims, the highest uphold category, against an overall buildings uphold rate of around four in ten (FOS, 2025).
• Which? found unfair delay featured in 38% of all upheld FOS complaints in 2023, the highest since 2019 (Which?).
• Delay was the second most common buildings complaint reason (23%), behind declined claims (41%), in the FOS annual data for 2024/25.

If the final response does not fix things, or eight weeks pass in silence, escalate to the Financial Ombudsman Service. You have six months from the final response letter to refer it.

What you can actually recover

A delay remedy has up to three parts:

1. Interest on money you were kept out of. Where the ombudsman finds you should have been paid earlier, it adds simple interest from when the money was due to when it is paid. For complaints referred to the FOS from 1 January 2026 the rate is the Bank of England average base rate plus one percentage point; older referrals attracted 8% simple (see the FOS interest announcement).
2. Distress and inconvenience. The ombudsman awards compensation in published bands, from around £100 for modest inconvenience up to £5,000 or more where a claim handled badly over a long period caused serious disruption. The bands are on the FOS compensation page. Months of avoidable delay with a family in a damp house sits well above the bottom band.
3. Damages for consequential loss under section 13A where late payment itself caused quantifiable loss: the court route, subject to the one-year limitation above.

Pressure points that move stuck claims

Some situations give you leverage beyond the general rules:

• Uninhabitable home. If your policy includes alternative accommodation, the insurer cannot leave you camping in an unliveable property while paperwork circulates. Demand the accommodation decision in days, not weeks, and log any refusal; it is exactly the "foreseeable harm" the Consumer Duty targets.
• Undisputed elements. Where part of the claim is agreed and part is not, ask for an interim payment on the agreed part now. There is rarely a good answer to "why are you withholding money you accept you owe?"
• Vulnerability. If someone in the household is elderly, ill, or disabled, tell the insurer in writing. Regulated firms must factor vulnerability into how they handle the claim, and the ombudsman will ask whether they did.

Where this fits

Delay rarely travels alone. If the claim finally moves and the offer is short, see challenging a low settlement offer and cash settlement or repair. If the slow-walk ends in a rejection, the claim rejection pillar guide takes over. And before any of it, know what your policy actually promises: time limits, alternative accommodation cover, how settlement works. Upload your policy to Roci and it will map your cover in minutes, so you can hold the insurer to the contract they wrote.