Is your job title adding £££s to your car insurance?

Filling out car insurance forms to arrange a policy is nobody’s idea of fun but the choices you make when completing the paperwork can have a major impact on the price you end up paying. Car insurance comparison site Quotezone has compared car insurance costs for 100,000 policies, and determined which job titles have the best and worst effects on your insurance premium.

Warehouse workers come off worst in the survey, facing insurance costs almost 40 per cent higher than the average driver. According to Quotezone, the average policy today costs £984.56, but warehouse workers are typically paying a whopping £1,371.67.

If you’re a healthcare assistant, working in a care home, hospital or medical clinic, you’re almost as hard hit with a premium that’s likely to be a chunky 36 per cent higher than the average driver is paying. Chefs are also seemingly in the firing line for insurance companies, as the data suggests that as a group they’re paying 30 per cent over the odds. This is not due to the proliferation of celebrity chefs with fancy car collections, the comparison site suggests, but rather a result of the unsociable hours, high pressure working environments and demanding schedules faced by the kitchen workers.

While insurers base their prices on risk analysis, which can be affected by work and lifestyle factors such as those faced by shift workers like the aforementioned, Quotezone suggests it’s reasonable for drivers looking for insurance to tweak the wording of their job title if it’s going to save them cash on a premium “as long as the chosen title is accurate and describes the job that they do”. For example, it’s suggested that Healthcare Assistants could try Care Worker or Care Assistant when applying for cover.

When there are losers in any system there must be winners, and in the case of cheaper car insurance it’s teachers, civil servants and HGV drivers who are doing best. Typically, they’re able to attract quotes that are up to 41 per cent better than the national insurance premium average.

The biggest rewards come at retirement age though, with pensioners enjoying premiums that are as much as 50 per cent lower than the national average.

According to the survey, around a quarter of drivers are unaware their job title can affect their premium at all, but of the nearly 40 per cent who have tried tweaking their title, almost two thirds netted a saving. However, close to a third of those surveyed were worryingly unaware that an inaccurate job title could invalidate their insurance altogether.

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