If you are considering buying a home with a pool or adding a pool to your existing property, don’t forget to consider the impact it will have on your homeowners insurance. Just like trampolines, pools are considered a liability and are essentially an “attractive nuisance,” which is anything that may attract a child to something on your property and that poses a danger to an unsupervised child. Other examples of attractive nuisances include farm equipment and man-made ponds.

You as the homeowner are liable for anyone who uses your pool, whether they have permission to do so or not. In particular, you are responsible for taking reasonable measures to protect children from the dangers that come with an attractive nuisance such as a pool. Those reasonable measures can include:

  • Installing a fence around the perimeter of the pool
  • Adding a safety cover
  • Posting signage
  • Providing accessible safety equipment

Increasing Your Coverage and Limits

However, even if you take all reasonable precautionary measures, it’s still a good idea to increase your homeowner’s insurance limits and coverage. Keep in mind, any increase in your homeowner’s insurance will bring a higher annual premium; this is because the insurance company is taking on a greater risk to insure you.

First off, confirm that your homeowner’s insurance policy does indeed cover swimming pools. Not all do. Then, you should increase the liability coverage offered under your homeowner’s insurance. Most policies come with $100,000 of liability coverage as standard, yet many homeowners don’t consider boosting that limit.

Next up, if you have significant assets, you should buy additional liability coverage as part of an umbrella insurance policy. This gives you a lot more liability coverage -- beyond the typical limits of a standard homeowner’s policy, at a bundled, more affordable price.

External Structures

Find out what your insurance company defines as a pool. Some consider a pool to be an external structure, which is a structure that is detached from the home but does not qualify as a policyholder’s personal property. In this case, you need to declare and list the pool on your policy, just like you would with a shed.

Keep in mind, most homeowner’s insurance covers the cost of replacing external structures up to 10 percent of the policy replacement cost value. So let’s say the replacement cost value of your house is $100,000… your policy will only cover up to $10,000 in damages to an external structure such as a pool. You may want to purchase additional coverage for external structures.

In the end, most homeowners find that the addition of a swimming pool has very little effect on their home insurance premiums. It’s important to incorporate good safety features on the pool and surrounding area and have adequate liability limits on your home insurance policy for peace of mind this summer.

Contact Bearce Insurance About Homeowners Insurance

Considering a pool? For more information on how such an action will impact your homeowner’s insurance rates, contact us locally at 508-586-3400 or toll-free at 800-498-9900, or get an online quote.