Will home insurance pay to restump your Shepparton house? Usually no, with three real exceptions.
The short answer is no. Every standard Victorian home building policy excludes wear and tear, gradual deterioration, rot and earth movement, and timber stumps giving way after 50 or 60 years in Goulburn Valley clay is all four of those at once. So a routine $12,000 to $22,000 full restump is yours to pay. The three exceptions are damage caused by an escape of liquid, by impact such as a vehicle or a falling tree, and by a declared insured event such as storm, fire or flood where you hold that cover. In every one of them the claim is won or lost on proving the cause, not on the size of the bill.
Covered event versus wear and tear, in plain words.
Home building insurance is written to pay for damage that happens suddenly because of something on a list: fire, storm, impact, escape of liquid, earthquake, malicious damage, and in some policies flood. It is not written to pay for a building wearing out. Insurers put that in the exclusions as wear and tear, gradual deterioration, rust, rot, mould, inherent defect, faulty workmanship and lack of maintenance. Timber stumps are consumable: they are meant to last 40 to 70 years and then be replaced. When yours reach that point the insurer treats the cost as the ordinary maintenance of an ageing house, and that position is correct.
Earth movement gets its own exclusion. Most Australian policies exclude subsidence, landslide, erosion, settling, and the shrinkage or expansion of soil, and then hand back a narrow slice of cover: earth movement is only paid for when it is caused by one of the listed events and occurs within a short window after it. That window is commonly 72 hours, though the exact wording varies, so read your own product disclosure statement rather than trusting a summary. In a district built on Class M to Class H reactive clay, that exclusion does a lot of work. Clay swelling in a wet winter and shrinking in a dry Shepparton summer is precisely the thing the policy says it will not pay for.
The three claims that do get paid around here
- Escape of liquid. A burst water service, a failed hot water unit, a cracked sewer or a broken stormwater line washes the bedding out from under a footing and a stump drops. This is resulting damage from a listed event and it is usually covered. Watch the split most policies apply: the damage to the building is covered, the cost of locating and repairing the pipe itself often is not.
- Impact. A vehicle into the front of the house, a large limb or a whole tree coming down onto the structure, and in some policies impact from an animal. The structural damage that follows, including footings and stumps, is normally covered.
- Storm, fire or flood. Storm cover is standard, fire is standard, and flood is a separately defined peril that you either hold or do not. In Shepparton and Mooroopna this matters more than almost anywhere in Victoria, because riverine flooding is a live risk on the Goulburn and Broken flats. Check your certificate of insurance for the word flood, not just storm.
What is almost never covered, whatever the sales brochure implies: rotted or perished stumps at the end of their life, termite and borer damage, damage from tree roots drawing moisture out of clay, poor original construction, and movement caused by drainage that has not been maintained. If a blocked or disconnected downpipe has been discharging under the floor for two years, an assessor will call that lack of maintenance and they will usually be right.
Evidence checklist, in the order a claim needs it.
Claims for subsidence and subfloor damage are lost on evidence, not on entitlement. Work down this list before a single stump, pipe or piece of rotted timber is removed. Tick as you go, the page remembers your ticks on this device, and print it to take under the house.
1. In the first hour, before anything moves
2. Measure it and write it down
3. Prove the cause, because cause decides the claim
4. Paperwork to dig out before you lodge
5. Do not do any of this yet
6. When you lodge and afterwards
What a make-safe is, and who pays for it.
Make-safe is the emergency work that stops the damage getting worse while the claim is being assessed. For a subfloor failure it means rated props under the failed bay and sometimes a temporary bearer, which is a $600 to $1,800 job around Shepparton. It is not a repair and it does not fix anything, and that is the point: it holds the position so the assessor sees the damage as it happened.
If your claim is accepted, authorised make-safe is paid as part of it, and your excess applies to the claim as a whole rather than separately to the propping. Ring the insurer first if it is safe to wait, and get the authorisation reference in writing before the props go in. If it is not safe to wait, do it anyway, keep the invoice, and take a full set of photographs before the props obscure the view. An insurer will rarely argue about propping that stopped a floor collapsing, but they will argue about a $9,000 permanent repair you commissioned before anyone inspected it.
Excess against repair cost, with the numbers
Home excesses in Victoria commonly sit between $500 and $1,500, and some policies carry a higher separate excess for earth movement or flood. Do this arithmetic before you lodge. A $1,800 bearer and stump repair against a $1,000 excess returns you $800, and that $800 is bought with a claim on your history that can lift your renewal for several years. A $16,000 full restump caused by a burst main against the same excess is obviously worth claiming. The line sits somewhere around $3,000: below that, and with an excess of $1,000 or more, most people are better off paying and keeping a clean claims record.
Need an itemised quote your insurer will accept?
We write scopes that separate stumps, re-levelling, permit and engineering, with dated subfloor photos attached, which is what an assessor asks for.
The assessor, the scope of works, and where claims stall.
Once you lodge, the insurer will usually appoint a loss assessor or adjuster to inspect. On anything structural they will often also engage a consulting engineer, and in a suspected escape of liquid claim they will want the drainage tested. The assessor is not there to design the repair, they are there to determine whether the damage falls within the policy and, if it does, what the reasonable scope of reinstatement is. That scope becomes the document everything else follows from, which is why you should read it line by line.
The usual stall points around here are simple. The insurer wants a causation opinion and nobody has produced one. The engineer’s report describes the repair but never says what caused the movement or when. The scope covers the three stumps that failed but not the fact that the same water damaged the bearer above them. Or the file simply sits. The General Insurance Code of Practice sets timeframes for responding and for keeping you updated, and if your claim still has no decision at four months you can raise it as a complaint through the insurer’s internal dispute process, then take it to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority, which is free for consumers.
Cash settlement or insurer-managed repair
Cash settlement. The insurer pays you a figure and you organise the work. The trap is that the figure is calculated at the insurer’s builder network rates, which in regional Victoria are frequently below what an independent restumper charges once permit and engineering are included. The second trap is finality: once you accept, the claim is closed, so the extra rotted bearer discovered when the subfloor opens up is yours. If you take a cash settlement, take it with an independent itemised quote in your hand and ask for the settlement to be reviewed against it.
Insurer-managed repair. The insurer’s builder does the work and carries a workmanship guarantee, which is genuinely worth something. The trap is control. You do not choose the contractor, the scope tends to be written to make good the affected area rather than to fix the underlying cause, and variations go back through the insurer rather than being settled on site. If you go this way, ask for the scope in writing before work starts, and check that the building permit and the AS 2870 footing design are included in it, because restumping is building work in Victoria and cannot lawfully proceed without them. Our permit guide sets out what that involves in Greater Shepparton.
What the insurer will ask your restumper for
- An itemised written scope and quote, with stumps, re-levelling, permit and engineer’s computations separated rather than bundled into one figure.
- A plain statement of cause and likely timing: what failed, why, and whether it is consistent with a sudden event or with age.
- Dated photographs from under the house, including the failed component before it is removed.
- ABN, registration details and a current public liability certificate of currency.
- Where the work exceeds the Victorian domestic building insurance threshold, evidence that the required cover is in place.
- A make-safe report if propping was done, with its own invoice separate from the repair quote.
When we tell people not to claim.
Most of the restumping we do in Shepparton, Mooroopna, Tatura and Numurkah is not claimable and never will be, because the stumps have simply reached the end of a long life. If you ring your insurer about that, you spend an hour on the phone, an assessor confirms wear and tear, and the contact may still be recorded. It is better to treat a routine restump the way you treat a roof or a hot water service: a planned capital replacement on an old house, best done in a dry stretch when access is good, which around here means late summer and autumn rather than a Goulburn Valley winter.
We are restumpers, not insurance brokers or claims advocates. We will write you an itemised scope, take the photographs and tell an assessor honestly what we found, including when what we found is age rather than an event. We will not write a report that says a burst pipe caused damage that was clearly there before it, and you should be wary of anyone who offers to. If a claim is genuinely borderline, a licensed insurance broker or a claims advocate is the right person to argue it, and the free AFCA process is the backstop.
One more thing worth knowing if the house is tenanted: landlord policies are a different animal and often include loss of rent while the property is uninhabitable, which can be the most valuable part of the claim. The obligations that sit alongside it are set out on our landlord and property manager page, and if you are dealing with a sudden drop right now, start with the first-hour steps.
Insurance questions we get asked
Does home insurance in Victoria cover restumping?
A burst pipe washed the soil out from under my stumps. Is that covered?
What is a make-safe and who pays for it?
Should I claim if the repair is small?
Cash settlement or let the insurer manage the repair?
What will the insurer want from my restumper?
Get the itemised quote and subfloor photos your claim needs
Tell us the claim number if you have one. We inspect free, photograph the subfloor before anything is touched, and send an itemised scope within a few days.
Not a claim, just an old house that needs doing?
That is most of our work. Free subfloor inspection, fixed-price written quote, permit and engineering included.