Your Home Contents Insurance Probably Covers About 13 Grams of Gold
Gold rose more than 60% over the year to late 2025. Insurance sub-limits did not.
That is the whole problem in two sentences, and most people find out about it at the worst possible moment. Here is what your policy probably says, what that limit works out to in grams at today's rate, and the exclusion that catches people out most often.
One thing first: we sell gold, we do not sell insurance. Nothing here is advice on which policy to buy. Every insurer words things differently and the only document that matters is your own policy wording. What we can do is help you work out what you actually own, which turns out to be the part most people are missing.
Start with what HDB fire insurance does not cover
A lot of flat owners believe they are already covered. They are not, or at least not for this.
HDB's mandatory fire insurance covers the structure of the flat. Not your renovations, not your furniture, and not anything you own. It exists to rebuild the shell, not to replace what was inside it. That is HDB's own description of the scheme, and it surprises people every time.
Covering your possessions needs a separate home contents policy. Which brings us to the number that matters.
The sub-limit, in grams
Home contents policies almost always cap jewellery, watches and precious stones separately from your overall sum insured. You might be covered for S$50,000 of contents in total and still have a jewellery cap in the low thousands. Figures vary by insurer, but sub-limits commonly sit around S$1,000 to S$2,000.
Now convert that into the unit gold is actually measured in. At a 916 rate of roughly S$155 per gram:
| Jewellery sub-limit | What it covers, in 916 gold |
|---|---|
| S$1,000 | about 6.4 grams |
| S$2,000 | about 12.8 grams |
| S$5,000 | about 32 grams |
Six to thirteen grams. That is one modest chain, or one bangle, and it is the whole collection rather than per piece.
Hold that against what a lot of Singaporean households actually keep in a drawer. A Si Dian Jin set. A bangle from a wedding. Two or three chains that have accumulated over twenty years. Getting past thirteen grams is not difficult, and most people passed it a long time ago without noticing.
The gap widened on its own, too. Nobody had to buy anything. A collection valued before the run of the past two years is worth substantially more now purely because of the metal price, while the number in the policy has not moved since the day it was written.
The exclusion nobody reads
This is the part worth reading carefully, because it is commonly misunderstood and getting it wrong is expensive.
Singapore home contents policies typically cover theft following violent and forcible entry by someone other than a member of your household. Read that phrasing again. It is doing two jobs: it usually requires forced entry, and it usually excludes people who live with you.
MSIG's home policy wording, for one, excludes loss caused by infidelity or dishonesty on the part of you, your household, or your employees. "Household" is generally defined as family, partner, children and anyone permanently living in the home.
So the honest position is the opposite of what you might assume. Insurers do distinguish between a stranger and a household member, and the household member is usually the excluded one. If a piece disappears and there is no sign of forced entry, a claim gets considerably harder.
That is not a reason to distrust your family. It is a reason to keep valuables somewhere sensible, and a reason not to treat a contents policy as a catch-all for everything that could go wrong.
What people actually do about it
There are two standard routes, and both start from the same place.
Schedule the pieces individually. Most insurers will let you list specific items on the policy at an agreed value, above the general sub-limit. That is usually the simplest fix for a handful of good pieces.
Take a valuables floater. A separate policy or extension covering listed valuables, which removes the combined-cap problem more comprehensively.
Both routes require the same input: a valuation. Insurers want to know what a piece is before they will agree a value for it, and the two things they need are weight and purity.
Worth checking with your own insurer rather than assuming: whether cover applies away from home, whether there is a per-item cap as well as a collection cap, and how often they want values refreshed. Because gold moves, values set a few years ago drift out of date on their own, and a piece scheduled at a 2023 value is scheduled at a 2023 gold price.
The reframe: you cannot insure what you have never weighed
Here is the thing that makes all of this simpler than it sounds.
Every question above — what your limit should be, whether to schedule, whether a floater is worth it — depends on one number you almost certainly do not have. How many grams of gold do you own, and at what purity?
Without that figure, you are guessing at a coverage level, and people guess low. With it, the arithmetic takes ten seconds:
What your gold is worth = total grams × purity × the day's gold rate
Ten grams of 916 at S$155 a gram is about S$1,550. Forty grams is about S$6,200. Once you know your own number, you can look at your policy and see immediately whether there is a gap, and how big.
That is not an insurance decision. It is an inventory question, and it is the one part of this you can settle in an afternoon.
Getting the number
Bring everything, including the pieces you never wear. The broken chain and the single earring still weigh something and still count.
Have each piece weighed and its purity tested. Weight and purity are what any insurer will ask for.
Write it down piece by piece, not as a lump total. Scheduling items individually needs individual figures.
Photograph each piece. Useful for a claim, useful for identification, and it takes two minutes.
Refresh it every couple of years. Gold moves. A list from three years ago describes a different amount of money.
At JJ Gold, we will weigh and test anything you bring in, whether or not you bought it from us, and tell you the gram weight and purity of each piece. That is the documentation an insurer asks for, and it costs nothing but the trip. If you would like a written note of the weights and purities to take away, ask and we will do that at the counter.
If it turns out you want to know what the pieces would actually fetch rather than what they would cost to replace, those are different numbers, and our guide to buyback and trade-in explains why.
A jewellery sub-limit of S$2,000 covers roughly thirteen grams of 916 gold at today's rate. Most households with any history of gold in the family are well past that, and the gap grew on its own while nobody was looking at it.
Fixing it starts with knowing the number. Bring the box to City Plaza #01-47 (810 Geylang Road, Singapore 409286) or Lucky Plaza #02-47 (304 Orchard Road, Singapore 238863) and we will weigh it in front of you. Call 8950 4377 first if you want to check we are quiet.
Then read your policy with a real figure in your hand, which is the only way that document ever makes sense.