Car insurance with previous convictions (UK 2026)

How much does a previous conviction add to car insurance?

In 2026 a driver with a previous motoring conviction pays somewhere between 15% and 200% more than an identical driver with a clean licence. Against the £719 average comprehensive premium recorded by the Confused.com Price Index for the three months to May 2026, that is roughly £827 for a single SP30 speeding conviction and £2,157 for a DR10 drink-driving conviction. Two things drive the number: the seriousness of the code, and how recent it is.

Insurers do not price penalty points in isolation. Three points from an SP30 (speed camera, 30mph limit) is treated as a routine risk signal and priced accordingly. Six points from an IN10 (driving without insurance) tells an underwriter something quite different — that the driver has previously operated outside the insurance system at all — and is loaded far harder even though the points count is similar. Codes involving alcohol, drugs or dangerous driving (DR, DG, DD) move a driver into a separate rating class that many mainstream insurers simply decline, which is why quotes collapse to a handful of specialist panels.

The second factor is time. A conviction is at its most expensive in the twelve months after the conviction date and then decays: by year three the loading has typically halved for minor codes, and once the conviction passes the five-year declaration window it stops being priced at all. That decay curve, not the original penalty, is what determines the true lifetime cost of a previous conviction. If you are shopping for cover right now with a live conviction on record, our convicted driver insurance guide covers the broker route in detail.

How long a previous conviction keeps costing you

Three separate clocks run at the same time after a motoring conviction, and confusing them is the single most common reason drivers either overpay or accidentally invalidate a policy.

1. The “active points” clock — 3 years. Penalty points count towards a totting-up ban for three years from the date of the offence. After that they can no longer push you to 12 points, but they are still on the record.
2. The licence-record clock — 4 or 11 years. Most codes (SP, CU, CD, IN, TT) stay on the DVLA record for four years from conviction. Drink and drug codes — DR10, DR20, DR30, DG10 — stay for eleven years. This is what an insurer sees if they check your licence electronically through MyLicence.
3. The declaration clock — 5 years. Almost every UK insurer asks about convictions in the last five years, regardless of whether the points are still active or the code has dropped off the licence. This is the clock that governs your premium.

Because the declaration window is five years, a single minor conviction typically follows this path on a mid-range policy: year one £827, year two around £791, year three around £755, year four around £733, and by year five it disappears from the question set entirely and you return to the £719 clean-licence baseline. The decay is not linear across all codes — serious codes hold their loading much longer, and a DR10 driver will often still see a meaningful uplift at year five because some specialist insurers ask about drink-driving over a longer period.

Two important qualifications. First, a conviction is priced from the date of conviction, not the date of the offence, so a case that takes months to reach court pushes the whole curve back. Second, if the conviction came with a disqualification, insurers usually also count the years since the ban ended, which effectively restarts the clock. Our page on insurance after a driving ban covers that case.

The Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 sits behind all of this. Motoring convictions carrying a fine or points become spent after 12 months for a fine and after the endorsement period for points-based penalties; once a conviction is spent you do not have to declare it and an insurer cannot legally rate on it. In practice, insurers set the question at five years precisely so it captures unspent convictions plus a safety margin — so the honest answer to “how long do I have to tell them?” is almost always five years.

Previous convictions and car insurance: common questions