What You Need to Know About Insurance and Trees: A Homeowner’s Guide

The tree fell. Or maybe it was just a part of it. Maybe it’s a neighbour’s tree. Maybe it hit the house, or a car, or maybe it hit nothing at all and just left a big mess in the yard.

What do you do?

First things first: safety

Before anything else, make sure you, your family, and your neighbours are safe.

If hydro lines are involved, stay far away from both the tree and the downed lines, and call your local hydro authority right away.

A downed tree that’s still an active hazard — blocking a driveway, leaning on a structure — doesn’t have to wait for business hours; that’s exactly what 24/7 emergency tree service is for.

Take pictures — lots of them

Once the immediate risk is out of the way, take pictures. Lots and lots of pictures, from different angles. Two particular things are worth photographing:

a) Where the failure happened. Did it come from near the roots, or did a big branch split near the top of the tree?

b) What was hit. Photograph the parts of the property that were damaged.

Pro tip — from someone who has looked at thousands of pictures of tree failure: a zoomed-out picture is more useful than a zoomed-in one. If all you can see is a wall of green leaves, it isn’t helpful to anyone.

Evaluate whether you need to call your insurance company

Two things worth knowing before you do:

Your deductible. A deductible is the amount you have to pay yourself before your insurance company covers the rest. It’s often around $1,000, but check your own policy — it varies.

Insurance may not cover the full cost of the tree work. This surprises a lot of homeowners. Many insurers will only pay to get the tree off whatever it damaged — the car, the fence, the house — not the cost of getting the tree off the property entirely. Confirm this with your insurer before making a claim.

Once you know what’s covered, most companies will give you a free quote for the removal itself — though it’s worth knowing when a free quote is the right call, and when it isn’t.

“But it isn’t my tree”

It doesn’t matter. You can fight it all you want — it still goes through your own insurance first.

In rare cases, your insurer will go after the neighbour’s insurance to recover the costs, including your deductible. This usually only happens when negligence can be proven — for example, if an arborist’s report (with photos) had already flagged the tree as hazardous years earlier and the neighbour didn’t act on it.

Boundary and shared trees also carry their own municipal rules on top of all this — see our guide to Ontario’s urban tree laws for how that works.

“Can I clean up before the adjuster assesses the tree?”

That’s a tough call, and one worth having directly with your insurance company. Some insurers will ask you (or arrange it themselves) to get quotes from three tree services before any work is done.

My own advice: push back on that if the tree’s current state is a real safety issue or is seriously affecting your ability to use your property. But it’s ultimately your call to make.

“How will this affect my insurance?”

That depends on your insurer, and on whether they think your property is at higher risk of tree damage going forward. A few things that can happen:

1. They ask you to have an arborist assess your trees.
2. They treat it as a one-off, and it doesn’t affect your future coverage.
3. They require certain trees to be pruned or removed.
4. In extreme cases, they refuse to insure you for tree damage going forward — in fifteen years of arboriculture, I’ve only seen this happen once.

Policies vary by insurer and by province, so treat this as a starting point for the conversation with your own broker, not a substitute for it. Looking for a company to handle the actual work? Browse the full directory.