Is Insurance Work Worth It? Rates, Payment Terms and the Volume Trade-Off

Ask around and you will get the same answer twice. Insurance work is steady, and insurance work pays badly. Both halves get repeated so often that most contractors never get to the actual question, which is not whether the rate is lower - it is - but whether lower-rate work that arrives on its own is worth more to your business than higher-rate work you have to go and find.

That is a maths question, not an opinion. So let me lay out the numbers and the mechanics honestly, including the bit that almost nobody mentions: on panel work you get statutory payment protections that a direct job for a homeowner does not give you. That single fact changes the calculation more than the headline rate does.

Who actually pays you on an insurance job

The insurer is not your client. That misunderstanding is behind half the complaints about this channel. A claim typically runs insurer, then loss adjuster or third-party administrator, then a managed repair network, then you. Your contract is with the network or the administrator. They set the rate, they set the terms, and they are the party you chase.

This is why "the insurance company still has not paid me" is usually the wrong sentence. The insurance company was never going to pay you. The network was, and the network has its own payment run, its own KPI regime, and its own commercial pressure from the insurer above it.

The rate: you are told it, you do not set it

Private work runs on your quote. Panel work runs on a schedule of rates - a priced list of unit rates agreed up front, so cost is known before the full scope is. It is the standard pricing method for maintenance and term contracts across the industry, and it exists because the payer needs cost certainty across thousands of claims, not because someone is trying to fleece you.

The practical consequence is that your commercial skill moves. You are not winning on the quote any more, because there is no quote. You are winning on whether you can deliver the scope inside the rate, and on how accurately you measure and record what you actually did. Contractors who come from private work and keep pricing in their head lose money on panel work almost immediately.

Payment terms: the part that runs in your favour

Here is the bit that flips the usual moan on its head. Because your contract is with a business rather than with the householder, insurance panel work sits inside legal protections that direct domestic work is specifically carved out of.

Section 106 of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 excludes contracts with a residential occupier from the Act's payment and adjudication regime - and it defines that as a contract where one of the parties to the contract occupies the dwelling as their residence. On a normal kitchen refit for a homeowner, that is exactly your situation, so the protections do not apply. On panel work, the parties are you and the network. Neither of you lives there. The exclusion does not bite.

What that hands you, on work you might have assumed was the weaker deal:

• The right to refer a dispute to adjudication at any time, rather than waiting on a court timetable.
• A statutory payment notice and pay-less notice regime, so they cannot simply decide to pay you less without notifying you properly and on time.
• Stage payments as of right on contracts lasting more than 45 days, instead of everything riding on the final account.
• The right to suspend performance for non-payment, with notice - a genuine lever, not a bluff.

On top of that, a late commercial payment carries statutory interest at the Bank of England base rate plus 8 percentage points. The base rate stood at 3.75% at the end of June 2026, which puts the statutory rate at 11.75% for debts falling late in the second half of 2026. You can also claim fixed compensation per overdue invoice: £40 on debts under £1,000, £70 from £1,000 to £9,999.99, and £100 at £10,000 or more. No clause in your contract is needed for any of it.

The real cost of entry is the badge, not the rate

When people ask whether insurance work is worth it, they are usually thinking about the rate. The rate is not what stops most contractors. The gate is.

Of the 23 UK insurance repair and FM networks we track, here is how the entrances actually break down as of July 2026:

Set that against the wider picture. Across the full directory of 557 UK work-winning routes we maintain, 253 take an open application - roughly 45%. In this category it is 4 out of 23, under a fifth. Insurance and FM panel work is one of the hardest channels in the entire landscape to get into. That is the honest headline, and it cuts both ways: the barrier that keeps you out is the same barrier that protects the margin of everyone already inside.

Where requirements are published, the ask is consistent: SSIP-level health and safety accreditation before engagement. One FM integrator asks for SafeContractor or equivalent plus an environmental accreditation, which lands somewhere around £400 to £700 a year depending on your size. Another requires Constructionline Gold, which is £599 plus a £99 joining fee at current pricing. A third accepts Constructionline Bronze at £319. That is your real entry ticket, payable before a single job is dispatched to you.

Volume commitments and the KPI regime

Getting on the list is not the end of it. Networks manage supply chains to service-level targets that the insurer is holding them to, so those targets get passed straight down to you: time to first contact, time to attend, time to complete, photographic evidence, customer satisfaction scores. Miss them consistently and the work quietly stops arriving. Nobody sends a letter.

Coverage expectations matter too. If you say you cover four postcodes, you will be dispatched work across four postcodes, including the job at the far edge on the wrong day. The admin load is real - every job carries evidence requirements that a private client would never ask for - and it is unpaid time that has to come out of the rate you already accepted.

Panel work does not pay you to be a better builder. It pays you to be a more reliable, better-documented one.

When it is a base load, and when it is a margin trap

Here is the decision, stripped down. Insurance work is a base load when it fills capacity you were already paying for. Your team is on the books, your van is insured, your overhead runs whether the diary is full or not. Work that arrives at a lower rate but with zero acquisition cost still contributes to that overhead. It smooths the troughs, which is worth real money to anyone who has had a quiet February.

It becomes a margin trap the moment it starts displacing better work rather than filling gaps. That happens quietly. The panel work is easy to say yes to because it is already in your inbox, so you stop chasing the private jobs that pay properly. Six months later your turnover looks fine and your profit margin has collapsed, because you replaced work you priced with work someone else priced.

The test I would apply: if panel work is above roughly half your capacity, you no longer have a customer, you have an employer - one who can change your rate schedule and does not owe you notice. Keep it as ballast underneath a book of higher-margin work you sourced yourself, and it does exactly what you want. Let it become the business and you have taken all the risk of self-employment for none of the pricing power.

So: is it worth it?

1. 01If you are new and hungry for volume: yes, if you can get in - but the entry gate is high and the badge costs money before the work does.
2. 02If your diary is patchy and your overhead is fixed: yes. This is the channel's best use, and the payment protections are better than most of your private work.
3. 03If your margin is already thin: no. Volume at a lower rate does not fix a margin problem, it dilutes it.
4. 04If you want to control your own pricing: no, and no amount of time on a panel will change that. The rate schedule is not yours.

The operators who do best out of this channel treat it as one line in a mix, not as the business. They run it alongside their own client flow, they subcontract delivery so the lower rate still carries a spread, and they never let one payer get big enough to dictate terms. That is the same logic behind construction arbitrage generally: your money is made on the spread between what the work sells for and what it costs you to deliver, and a channel that hands you predictable volume is only good news if that spread survives contact with it.

Work out your real cost to deliver a job before you accept anybody's rate schedule. If you do not know that number, you cannot answer this question for your own business, and nobody on the internet can answer it for you - including me. Start with the margin levers that actually move the number, then decide what insurance volume is worth on top.