Compare Taxi Insurance Quotes

Most experienced UK private hire drivers with a clean record pay £1,200 to £2,500 a year for comprehensive cover. London PCO and black cab drivers usually cost anywhere between £2,000 and £3,500. New badge holders in their first year typically pay £2,400 to £4,500. Drivers with 6+ points or convictions like DR10 or CU80 can pay £3,500 to £6,000+. Fleet rates run £9,000 to £15,000 for five vehicles, depending on claims history and operating area.

Private hire (PHV) covers pre-booked work only, through an app, office or operator. Uber, Bolt, minicabs and most modern app drivers sit here. Public hire (hackney carriage) covers vehicles licensed to be flagged down or wait at official taxi ranks. Black cabs in London, hackneys everywhere else. Public hire policies cost more because the risk is broader. Picking up a street flag-down on a PHV policy is one of the fastest ways to void a claim.

No. Uber provides limited third-party liability cover for trips actively in progress, but it doesn’t replace your own private hire policy. You still need full hire and reward cover from your insurer to be road-legal, to keep your PHV licence valid, and to be covered between trips, on the way to a pick-up, or for damage to your own vehicle. Treating Uber’s cover as a substitute for your own policy is the single biggest insurance mistake new app drivers make.

A full-time taxi driver clocks three to five times the mileage of an average UK motorist, works the worst hours for accidents, and carries fare-paying passengers who can claim against the policy. Add stop-start urban driving, late-night exposure and stranger risk, and the actuarial picture is fundamentally different to a car used for the school run. The premium reflects that. A specialist broker panel still narrows the gap by matching you to insurers that genuinely want to write your risk.

A standard UK taxi insurance policy includes comprehensive motor cover (your vehicle and third parties), hire and reward use class (legally allowing you to carry paying passengers), public liability (for members of the public around the vehicle), and passenger liability (for fare-paying passengers in the back). Optional extensions include breakdown cover, replacement taxi, loss of earnings, windscreen cover, key cover and EV battery cover. See the taxi insurance page for full cover details.

Yes, but the cover comes through specialist schemes rather than the big-name insurers. SP30 speeding points add roughly 10%-20% to a quote. 6+ points or convictions like DR10 (drink driving), DG10 (drugs), IN10 (no insurance) or CU80 (phone use) push the premium up significantly and narrow the panel of insurers willing to quote. Honest disclosure at the quote stage is essential because the Insurance Act 2015 treats hidden convictions as material misrepresentation that voids the policy.

Yes. Taxi insurance covers passengers. Food delivery insurance (Uber Eats, Deliveroo, Just Eat) covers goods in transit. They’re two separate products, and one policy doesn’t extend to the other. Doing Uber Eats on a taxi-only policy means any incident during delivery isn’t covered. The cleanest setup is a courier extension added to the taxi policy, or two policies with overlapping cover periods if the insurer won’t combine them.

The biggest levers are fitting an approved tracker (10%-20% off on theft-target vehicles like Priuses and Teslas), fitting a dual-facing dashcam (5%-10% off most policies), increasing voluntary excess to £500 or £1,000 (8%-12% off), paying annually rather than monthly to avoid 15%-25% APR on the credit, parking off-street overnight where possible, and using a specialist broker with access to schemes the big comparison sites can’t always reach.

The Toyota Prius is consistently the cheapest car to insure for UK taxi work. Parts availability, repair networks, hybrid fuel efficiency and a long claims history at the insurance level all keep premiums down. Honda Insight and older Toyota Auris work too. Tesla Model 3 sits higher because of battery and ADAS repair costs. LEVC TX black cabs and Mercedes E-Class chauffeur vehicles carry the highest per-vehicle rates.

No, and this is the single most common mistake new app drivers make. Business use covers driving for work-related purposes (sales reps, area managers, site visits). Hire and reward covers carrying paying passengers, which is a fundamentally different risk class. They’re not interchangeable. A policy with “Class 1 business use” or “Class 3 business use” added on top of social, domestic and pleasure does not let you carry fares. You need a dedicated taxi policy with hire and reward on the schedule.

The PCO badge is the Transport for London Private Hire Vehicle Licence required to drive Uber, Bolt or any pre-booked taxi in London. Both the driver and the vehicle need to be PCO-licensed. PCO insurance is just London-specific taxi insurance written for TfL-licensed drivers and vehicles. London premiums are 40-70% above the UK average for the same driver, mostly because of theft frequency, EV uptake and high mileage. See the London PCO insurance page for details.

Yes. Tesla Model 3, LEVC TX, BYD ATTO 3 and Nissan Leaf taxis are all written by specialist EV taxi schemes on the panel. The key thing is making sure the policy explicitly covers the battery of the vehicle, which uses an approved EV repair network for ADAS recalibration, and isn’t just a petrol taxi policy with an EV slid in. 

Two vehicles are usually the tipping point; three is almost always the right time. A fleet policy rates against the combined claims experience of the operation rather than individual driver NCB, sits on one renewal date, and handles vehicle and driver changes through endorsements rather than new policies. See taxi fleet insurance for the structure.

Same day for most policies. Once you’ve completed the quote form (about 3 minutes), specialist brokers usually come back with tailored quotes within a few hours. Pick a policy, the broker handles the paperwork, and the certificate is emailed across so you can keep working. Drivers with complex setups (convictions, fleet operations, EV taxis) sometimes need an extra working day for proper underwriting.

Notify the insurer within 24 hours, ideally at the scene. Capture passenger details, third-party details and any witnesses. Take photos, retain dashcam footage, and get a police crime reference number if there’s any criminal element (theft, malicious damage, assault). Most claims that get reduced or declined trace back to a mismatch between the schedule and reality (wrong use class, undeclared modification, missing extension), so the paperwork done at the quote stage matters as much as anything done after the incident.

Some insurers give an introductory discount for private car NCB when you take out a first taxi policy, but the discount is usually limited and not a one-for-one transfer. Once you’re on a taxi policy, NCB builds separately as hire and reward NCB. It compounds year on year and is the single biggest premium-saver for long-tenured taxi drivers. Hire and reward NCB doesn’t generally transfer back to a private car policy if you stop driving taxi work.

For self-employed taxi drivers and limited company taxi operators, the policy premium is generally an allowable business expense and can be set against taxi income for tax purposes. Sole traders deduct it through self-assessment as a motoring expense. LTD company operators expense it through the company accounts. We’re not accountants, so worth confirming with yours on the specific apportionment if the vehicle has any personal use mixed in.