What Is Considered Personal Property on a Home Policy?
Personal property on a homeowners policy means the movable things you own and keep in the house — furniture, clothes, electronics, dishes, tools, bedding, books, the contents of your closets. It's insured under Coverage C, which the California Department of Insurance describes as the coverage for your personal belongings, separate from the structure itself. The simple test most adjusters use: if you'd take it with you when you moved, it's probably Coverage C.
The dividing line is "attached or not"
Your policy splits your stuff into two buckets, and the split matters because each bucket has its own limit.
Things built in or fastened down belong to the dwelling limit. The Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner explains dwelling coverage as the house plus what's attached to it. So your kitchen cabinets, the furnace, built-in dishwasher, wall-to-wall carpet, light fixtures, and the water heater generally ride along with Coverage A — not Coverage C. We go deeper into that boundary in what counts as the dwelling.
Things that sit loose in the house are personal property:
- Sofas, beds, dressers, rugs that aren't tacked down
- Clothing, shoes, luggage
- TVs, laptops, game consoles, small appliances
- Dishes, cookware, linens, decor
- Lawn mowers, hand tools, bicycles, sports gear
- Food in the pantry and freezer
It usually follows you off the property
One thing that surprises people: Coverage C typically isn't limited to things sitting inside your house. Personal property coverage generally travels, so a suitcase stolen from a hotel room or a laptop taken from your car can fall under the same coverage — often at a reduced percentage when the property is at another residence you own. The Texas Department of Insurance home insurance guide is a good plain-language starting point, but the off-premises wording is specific to your form, so read it rather than assume.
Some categories have their own small sub-limits
Even though your overall Coverage C limit might be large, policies cap certain high-value or easily-stolen categories at much lower amounts. Common ones include cash and coins, jewelry and watches (especially for theft), silverware, firearms, business property kept at home, and collectible items like stamps or trading cards.
These are called special limits of liability, and they're not a mistake or a penalty — they're how insurers keep a general contents limit from becoming an unlimited jewelry policy. If you own something that falls in one of those buckets and is worth real money, the usual fix is a scheduled personal property endorsement or a separate floater, which raises the limit for that specific item. Your agent can price it; your declarations page and the "special limits" section of your policy will tell you where you stand today.
How the limit gets set
Coverage C is normally written as a percentage of your dwelling limit rather than a number you pick from scratch. The North Carolina Department of Insurance names the standard sub-limits as roughly 10% of Coverage A for other structures, 50% for personal property, and 20% for loss of use. That's the default, not a law — we unpack how much it moves in is Coverage C really 50% of Coverage A, and you can see how all four letters fit together in Coverage A, B, C, and D explained.
How a contents loss gets valued
The other half of the question is not what's covered but what it pays. Contents are often settled on an actual cash value basis unless you've added replacement cost coverage, meaning depreciation comes off the payment for a six-year-old couch. Washington's regulator guide walks through how depreciation factors in. If you want replacement cost on contents, that's typically an endorsement — worth asking about by name, since the two settlement bases can produce very different checks on the same loss.
What to do with this
Pull your declarations page and find the Coverage C line. Then look up the special limits section. Those two spots tell you your overall contents limit, which categories are capped lower, and whether you're on replacement cost or actual cash value. Everything else is detail your agent can walk you through once you know what to ask.