State and AMI are the same wording
Start here, because it changes how everything else on this page should be read.
State Home Comprehensive and AMI Home Plus are both owned by IAG, and the two policy documents are not merely similar. Setting aside the brand names and the product names, they measure 99.89% identical. The benefits are the same benefits with the same limits, the exclusions are the same exclusions, and the worked examples in the margins use the same numbers.
So a State quote and an AMI quote are not two policies to weigh up. They are one policy at two prices. Whatever separates them, it is not the cover.
This is worth knowing before you spend an evening comparing them, and it is worth knowing before you read any table that lists both brands as separate options. Where two columns carry the same document, a reader who does not know that will read their agreement as confirmation of something.
None of this is a criticism. One insurer maintaining one wording behind two brands is ordinary and sensible. The only problem is that two names imply a choice which, on cover, is not there.
Who State is, and who pays the claim
State is a direct brand, sold over the phone and online rather than through brokers, and it has been part of the New Zealand market for a long time. The company behind it is IAG New Zealand, the largest general insurer in the country.
IAG also owns AMI and NZI, and underwrites house policies sold under several bank brands. This is the single most useful thing to understand about the New Zealand market. There are more brands than there are insurers, and several of the names you can buy a house policy from lead back to the same balance sheet.
This page reads the home half of the Home Comprehensive wording. Home Comprehensive is the fuller of the two State house products, so the figures below are the higher ones. Contents is a separate policy and is out of scope for this site.
What the basis of settlement on your schedule decides
Your policy schedule is the page listing your address, your cover and your excess. On it is a line called the basis of settlement, and it says either Sum insured replacement or Replacement.
Sum insured replacement is the arrangement most New Zealanders will recognise. You give State a figure for what the house would cost to rebuild, and that figure is the ceiling on what the policy can pay.
Replacement lifts that ceiling, but only in one narrow set of circumstances. The loss has to come from fire or explosion, that fire must not have been caused by a natural hazard, and you have to repair or rebuild. Where all three are true, the wording says the limit of your home sum insured does not apply, and the cap becomes the replacement cost of the house up to the floor area shown on your schedule.
The practical version is short. On a Replacement policy, the number standing between you and an underinsured house fire is the floor area in square metres, not the dollar figure. Anyone who has extended a house without telling their insurer has a floor area on file that is wrong.
For a flood, a storm, an earthquake, a landslip, or a fire that followed one of those, the sum insured still caps the claim on either basis.
The caps hiding inside your sum insured
Three things on a New Zealand property are expensive, easy to forget, and capped inside the State wording rather than covered up to the full sum insured.
All retaining walls together are limited to fifty thousand dollars. A permanently fixed swimming pool and the equipment it needs is limited to fifty thousand dollars. A bridge, culvert, permanent ford or dam is limited to fifteen thousand dollars. These are not extra amounts sitting on top of your rebuild figure. They are ceilings that apply within it.
The way to lift them is to have the item listed on your policy schedule as a special feature with its own sum insured. The wording also treats a wharf, pier, landing or jetty, and a cable car, as items that only work this way. If they are not named on the schedule, they are not separately insured.
On a flat suburban section this may never matter. On a sloping section, a lifestyle block or anything with water access, it can be the difference between a claim that rebuilds the property and one that rebuilds the house and leaves you with the rest.
The total sum insured is the sum of all of it. The home sum insured, every special feature sum insured, and all the automatic and optional benefits, unless a benefit says otherwise. That total is the ceiling for one event.
What is included as standard
The automatic benefits are the ones in the policy without being bought separately. The figures below are the ones printed in the wording named at the top of this page.
Reading a table like this, remember that a larger number is not automatically better cover. What the money can be spent on is decided by the clause, and the notes on the right are where that shows.
| Benefit | What it covers | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Natural hazard damage | Sudden accidental loss to the house from earthquake, flood, landslip and the other natural hazards. | The gap above your Commission entitlementState pays the difference between the Natural Hazards Commission entitlement and what the policy would otherwise pay. The Commissionβs excess stays with you. |
| Temporary accommodation | Somewhere of a similar standard to live while the house cannot be lived in, including for your pets. | $30,000 per event, per dwellingMain residence only. Also payable where an authority orders you out ahead of damage that has not happened yet. |
| Methamphetamine contamination | Remediating contamination that first happens and is discovered during the period of insurance. | $30,000 per dwellingExcluded where you or your family caused it, and largely unavailable on a tenanted house that is not your main residence. |
| Retaining walls | Walls holding back earth anywhere on the property, added together. | $50,000, inside the home sum insuredA cap within the sum insured rather than money on top of it. Naming the wall as a special feature is what raises it. |
| Swimming pool | A permanently fixed pool and the equipment it needs, including pumps. | $50,000, inside the home sum insuredAnything dearer has to appear on the schedule as a special feature with its own figure. |
| Bridge, culvert, ford or dam | Permanent crossings and water structures on the property. | $15,000, inside the home sum insuredThe lowest of the three internal caps, and the one most likely to be exceeded on a lifestyle block. |
| Hidden gradual damage | Accidental hidden damage that both first happens and is discovered while insured with State. | $3,000 per period of insuranceThe cause is not covered. Undamaged parts of the house opened up to reach the cause are, if State approves the work first. |
| Landscaping | Restoring the garden or lawn, whether damaged by the event or wrecked by the repair work afterwards. | $1,500 per event |
| Stress payment | A cash payment where State decides the dwelling is a total loss. | $2,000Paid on top of the building settlement. |
| Sustainability upgrade | Upgrading to products that use less energy or water, or reduce environmental impact, during a rebuild. | $15,000Total loss only, conditional on rebuilding and on State approving the products. |
| Fatal injury | A payment to the legal representative where fire, burglary, theft or home invasion fatally injures you or your family. | $10,000 per eventDivided equally where more than one person is entitled. |
| Replacement of keys and locks | Replacing keys, altering or replacing the locks they opened, and opening a safe or strongroom. | No excess where the claim is only for keysIncludes electronic keys, swipe cards and combinations, and applies to a key reasonably believed to have been copied. |
| Water or sewage pipe blockage | Clearing a blocked underground water or sewage pipe you are legally responsible for. | $500 per period of insurance, no excessExplicitly not general maintenance. |
| Sale and purchase | Cover for the buyer where the house is damaged after an unconditional contract is signed. | Until settlement or possessionConditional on the buyer having no other insurance on the house at the time. |
| Legal liability | What you owe someone else for accidentally damaging their property or injuring them. | $2 million per eventCosts, expenses and reparation come out of that same figure. |
| Electronic programs | Restoring, reprogramming or resetting the software in electronics built into the house. | Necessary and reasonable costData is excluded, so a claim restores the system rather than what was on it. |
The excess rule that quietly shrinks every capped benefit
The excess is the first part of any claim you pay yourself. Most people expect it to come off the amount they are paid, and on a straightforward house claim that is exactly what happens.
Where a benefit has its own limit, the wording works differently, and it gives two examples to show it. On a benefit capped at five thousand dollars, a claim of two thousand five hundred with a seven hundred and fifty dollar excess pays out one thousand seven hundred and fifty. On a benefit capped at two thousand dollars, the same claim with the same excess pays out one thousand two hundred and fifty, because the excess is taken off the two thousand dollar limit rather than off the claim.
The consequence runs through the whole table above. Every capped benefit is worth its stated figure minus your excess, not its stated figure. On a five hundred dollar drain unblocking benefit that would matter a great deal, which is presumably why that particular benefit carries no excess at all.
One rule runs the other way, in your favour. Where a single event triggers several policies you hold with State at the same address, only the highest of the excesses is deducted rather than one for each policy.
After a claim, your cover is smaller until the repair is finished
When State pays a claim for damage to the house or to a special feature, the sum insured for that item and the total sum insured are both reduced by the cost of putting the damage right. The reduction is treated as applying from the start of the period of insurance rather than from the day of the claim.
The wording works it through. A retaining wall repair costing sixty thousand dollars, against a special feature sum insured of one hundred thousand, leaves that wall covered for forty thousand. A total sum insured of seven hundred thousand becomes six hundred and forty thousand.
The amounts are reinstated when the repair is complete. The gap in between is the exposure. A house waiting on a builder after a storm is a house whose cover for the next storm is smaller, and nothing on your renewal notice will point that out.
Slow damage, and what three thousand dollars buys
House insurance responds to sudden accidental damage. Damage that arrives slowly, over months or years, is excluded almost everywhere, and a hidden leak is how most New Zealand houses get quietly wrecked.
State covers accidental hidden gradual damage that both first happens and is discovered while the house is insured with State. The most it pays in a period of insurance is three thousand dollars.
The cost of fixing whatever leaked is not covered. What is covered, and this is the part worth knowing, is the damage done to undamaged parts of the house in order to find or reach the cause. Pulling up a floor or opening a wall to get at a pipe counts, provided State approves the work before it starts.
Three thousand dollars is a contribution towards an early discovery rather than a fix for a long-running problem. Anything found late is likely to cost several times that.
Houses that sit empty
Cover is restricted once a house has been unoccupied, and State can change the terms of the policy at that point. The reason is straightforward. In an empty house nobody notices the leak, the break-in or the smoke.
The wording sets out a way to keep cover on a house that is regularly empty, provided it is recorded as a holiday home and every one of a list of conditions is met. The house and its grounds have to be inspected inside and out at least every sixty days, by you or someone you nominate. Everything has to be adequately maintained. Mail has to be cleared regularly. The water supply has to be turned off. All doors have to be locked and all windows secured.
Every item on that list is a condition, not a suggestion, and the water supply is the one most often overlooked. It is also the one the clause is most obviously designed around, because a burst pipe running for a fortnight into an empty house is an expensive claim.
The restriction lifts as soon as someone is living in the house again.
What you have to buy separately
Four benefits apply only if your policy schedule shows you bought them.
Additional costs for heritage homes covers the extra cost of rebuilding heritage features properly. Excess-free glass and bathroom fixtures removes the excess from those claims. Lifestyle block fencing extends fencing cover on a larger property. Matching floor coverings pays to replace undamaged flooring so a repaired room matches.
Matching floor coverings deserves a moment, because the gap it fills causes more disappointment than any other single clause in New Zealand house insurance. Without it, the insurer pays for the damaged part and not for the undamaged part, and a house ends up with two shades of the same floor.
What to check before you buy
None of these has one right answer. Each is a place where the wording gives a different result depending on something only you can see.
Worth checking on the schedule and on the property:
- The basis of settlement, and if it is Replacement, whether the floor area is the floor area of the house as it stands today.
- Whether retaining walls, a pool, a culvert, a jetty or a cable car are named as special features, and whether the internal caps would cover them if not.
- Where the sum insured came from, and how long ago.
- Whether every holiday home condition can honestly be met, including turning the water off.
- Whether you are also holding an AMI quote, and that it is the same document.
- Whether matching floor coverings is worth the extra for the flooring you actually have.
Common questions
- Who underwrites State house insurance?
- IAG New Zealand, which also owns AMI and NZI and underwrites house cover sold under several bank brands. A State claim and an AMI claim are paid by the same company.
- Is State Home Comprehensive different from AMI Home Plus?
- Not in cover terms. After setting brand and product names aside, the two wordings measure 99.89% identical, including the benefit limits and the exclusions. Price, service and claims handling are where the brands differ.
- Does State cover retaining walls?
- Up to fifty thousand dollars for all retaining walls together, and that amount sits inside the home sum insured rather than on top of it. A wall worth more than that must be listed on the schedule as a special feature with its own sum insured.
- What happens to my State cover after I make a claim?
- The sum insured for the damaged item and the total sum insured are both reduced by the cost of the repair, treated as applying from the start of the period of insurance. Both are reinstated once the repair is finished.
- Is State cheaper than AMI?
- That cannot be answered generally and this site publishes no premiums. Since the wording is the same document, price and service are the only things that separate the two, which makes getting both quotes on the same property worthwhile.