AXA Landlord Insurance Review

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AXA sells landlord cover through AXA Business Insurance rather than alongside its household policies, and the product is shaped for people who own more than one address. Up to 10 rental properties sit on a single policy with one renewal date, the online quote starts at £15 a month for a single property — a figure 10% of customers paid or beat between April and June 2026 — and monthly instalments carry 0% interest rather than the credit charge most insurers add.

The standard cover is fuller than the price suggests. Subsidence, ground heave and landslip are built into the residential cover rather than sold as an extra — the commercial landlord product lists them as an option — and so are trace and access, cables and underground pipes, and the cost of rehousing tenants if the property becomes uninhabitable after a claim. Property owners' liability runs up to £10,000,000, and on the direct residential product the range on offer starts at £1,000,000. Houses, bungalows, individual flats, converted flats, whole blocks and land-only risks all quote online, and student lets are accepted — a tenant type several insurers refuse outright.

Behind all of it is AXA Insurance UK plc, company number 00078950, registered in England and dual-regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Financial Conduct Authority. Its firm reference, 202312, is printed on the product documents themselves and can be checked on the FCA Register. If loss of rent is added, the shortfall is covered for as long as 36 months, which is longer than a good many landlord policies will run.

Three AXA landlord policies, and they are not the same policy

Ask for AXA landlord cover and you can end up with one of three products, all underwritten by the same company and carrying materially different numbers.

Buy on axa.co.uk and you get the residential landlord wording: up to 10 properties, liability from £1,000,000 to £10,000,000, subsidence included, students welcome. Ask a broker and you may be sold the AXA Buy to Let personal-lines wording instead, where landlord's contents are chosen between £5,000 and £60,000, garden contents stop at £250, anything in a garage or outbuilding stops at £1,000, public liability is fixed at £2,000,000 and the legal expenses section is not AXA's at all — it is underwritten by AmTrust Europe Limited, firm reference 202189.

Ask the same broker for the commercial SME landlords product and the scale changes again: buildings to £10,000,000 per location, landlord's contents to £75,000, loss of rent to £2,500,000, employers' liability to £10,000,000, legal expenses at £100,000 any one claim and £1,000,000 any one period, and up to 20 locations on one schedule. That wording adds a 25% day-one uplift to the buildings figure as standard, pays up to £5,000 to make good a property used for drug cultivation and up to £2,500 for theft from outbuildings. It also declines students, which the direct product accepts. Establish which of the three you are being quoted before comparing the price to anything else.

Rent cover pays after damage, not after a tenant stops paying

AXA's rental income protection is loss of rent, not rent guarantee. It answers when fire, flood or similar insured damage makes the property uninhabitable, and on that trigger it is generous: the shortfall is met for up to 36 months, and the leaseholder wording allows an indemnity period of 12, 24 or 36 months to be chosen at inception. If access is denied or a public supply fails, the payment is capped at the lower of £250,000 or 25% of annual rental income, for a maximum of 12 weeks. Tenant rehousing runs to 20% of the damaged building's sum insured for up to 24 months.

What none of that reaches is a tenant who simply stops paying. AXA states plainly on its own pages that rent guarantee is not covered, and that matters more in 2026 than it did two years ago. Section 21 was abolished on 1 May 2026 under the Renters' Rights Act 2025; existing tenancies converted to assured periodic tenancies on that date, possession now needs a Section 8 ground, and landlords had to serve the government information sheet or an equivalent written statement by 31 May 2026 or face a penalty of up to £7,000 for a first offence. Arrears cases take longer than they used to, and the AXA policy does not stand behind that gap. Rent guarantee has to be bought elsewhere.

One footnote from the Financial Ombudsman Service puts the size of that market in perspective: in the quarter to June 2026 it recorded fewer than 10 new rent protection complaints in the whole country, against 1,766 for buildings insurance. Very few landlords are buying the product at all.

Forty-five days is the number to write on the tenancy file

Every version of this cover tightens once a property is empty. The limit is 45 consecutive days. Past that point AXA's own summary says the property is no longer covered as normal, and the broker SME wording is more explicit again: 45 days of full cover mid-term, after which the risk is referred back to an underwriter. A wholly unoccupied property will not be taken on as new business at all, and no more than 20% of a portfolio can be empty when the policy starts.

Void periods between tenancies, a probate sale, a refurbishment between lets or a slow eviction can all cross 45 days without anyone thinking to telephone. That is the single most likely way a landlord holding this policy finds a claim refused, and it is worth a diary entry on the day a tenant hands the keys back.

Excesses vary by wording and are only partly published. The buy-to-let document shows a £100 compulsory excess with a minimum of £250 on escape of water; the SME wording runs variable property damage excesses of £100 to £500 that cannot be adjusted for flood, malicious damage, theft by tenant or subsidence; the leaseholder wording carries a £200 minimum on property damage and £1,000 on subsidence. The direct site publishes no excess figures before you reach a quote, so the number that will apply to you is one you have to ask for.

Complaints, and how AXA's own figures read

AXA publishes its regulatory complaints return, which is more than many insurers do voluntarily. For the six months to 30 June 2026, AXA Insurance UK plc opened 18,717 complaints and closed 18,093. It upheld 59.2% of them — above the 55.54% average across all financial services firms the FCA reported for the second half of 2025 — and the leading cause was general administration and customer service rather than claims decisions.

A high uphold rate can be read two ways. It means a large share of complaints were justified; it also means a customer who complains to AXA has a better than even chance of AXA agreeing without the matter going further. If it does go further, the Financial Ombudsman Service is free and its decision binds the insurer if you accept it. The Ombudsman took 6,399 new buildings insurance complaints across 2025/26 and upheld 38% of them, so a landlord dispute over a building claim is neither unusual nor a lost cause.

The regulator's own product data does not cover this market. The FCA's general insurance value measures release of 21 July 2026 reports claims acceptance for consumer lines only, and landlord and property owners' policies fall outside it — there is no published acceptance rate for this product from anyone, AXA included. Any comparison table claiming one is inferring it.

The starting price moves depending on which AXA page you land on

AXA quotes three different entry figures across its own landlord section, and each describes a different window. The main landlord page says £15 a month, based on the cheapest 10% of customers between April and June 2026. The multi-property page says £14 a month, drawn from January to March 2026. The landlord FAQ page quotes £173 a year. All three are honest tenth-percentile figures with the sample period disclosed, which is better practice than most, but they describe single properties on the cheapest risks — a terraced flat let to a working professional, not a four-bed HMO with students in it.

Price a landlord policy on the limits instead. The gap between £1,000,000 and £10,000,000 of property owners' liability costs very little and matters enormously if a tenant is injured by something structural. The £5,000 cap on malicious damage and theft by tenants is the figure most likely to disappoint after a bad let, and it is the same £5,000 on both the direct and the broker wordings. And landlord's contents at £5,000 to £60,000 on the buy-to-let wording is a decision about white goods and carpets, not furniture you would insure at home.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 26 August 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.