Market value, agreed value or new value: what does your omnium pay?

Market value, agreed value, new value: the difference in three sentences

Market value, which Belgian policies almost always call valeur réelle, is the second-hand price of your car the instant before the claim. Agreed value, valeur agréée, is an amount settled in advance, calculated from the list price or the invoice and then eroded by a monthly table. New value is not a third regime: it is the name given to the opening period during which that table has not yet started to bite.

Three words, one line of your particular conditions, and a gap counted in thousands of euros.

Search for the market value of a car from Belgium and you will land on Ornikar, La Centrale, MAIF or NetVox. Those pages are all serious work, and they all discuss VRADE, the French replacement value assessed by an expert. That concept is French. It appears in no Belgian policy, where the relevant pair is valeur réelle against valeur agréée, and where the depreciation table sits in the general conditions nobody opens.

How does a loss adjuster calculate market value?

He reconstructs a resale price, not a purchase price.

The adjuster starts from the Belgian second-hand market for an equivalent model, then corrects for four factors that insurers list with remarkable consistency: age, mileage, general condition, and the purchase price taken as a rough marker. P&V adds market value as a criterion in its own right. None of this is negotiated on feeling: it rests on published ratings, comparable listings and a physical inspection.

One point regularly surprises owners of well-equipped cars. Factory options inflate the list price, and therefore the agreed value, but barely move the resale price. A sunroof invoiced at €1,800 when new returns almost nothing three years later on the used market.

How is agreed value set in Belgium?

It is fixed when you take out the policy, in writing, and it depends on no later assessment.

The insurer picks a starting base, then applies a monthly discount. At Ethias, the base is the list price of the vehicle at first registration, factory-fitted options and accessories included, expressed excluding VAT and with discounts not deducted. That last detail is worth money: if you negotiated €4,000 off at purchase, the insurance still reasons on the list price. The Belgian registration tax, taxe de mise en circulation, can be added on request.

Test Achats, the Belgian consumer organisation, points to the real fault line between contracts. Some omnium policies base agreed value on the list price, others on the price shown on the invoice, often far lower because of discounts. The first regime pays more. Your particular conditions state which one you signed, in a single line, usually without comment.

The depreciation table of a Belgian policy, month by month

A real example beats a principle. The general conditions of the mini omnium and omnium complète formulas at Ethias publish the following table, applied to the insured value in the event of a total loss.

Any calendar month started counts as a full month, and the clock starts on the first day of the month of first registration. Run the numbers on a car with a list price of €30,000 excluding VAT declared a total loss in month 30: twelve months at 0 %, twelve months at 1.5 % giving 18 %, then six months at 1 % giving 6 %. Total depreciation reaches 24 %, the payout lands at €22,800 excluding VAT, plus VAT depreciated in the same proportion, that is €4,788 capped at the VAT you actually bore.

The same vehicle, valued at market value by an adjuster at thirty months and 45,000 km, sits closer to €20,000. The gap approaches €8,000. It corresponds exactly to the premium supplement you did, or did not, pay over two and a half years.

New value and agreed value are not the same thing

Sales vocabulary keeps the confusion alive, and not always by accident.

New value, purchase-price guarantee, omnium 24 months, six months without depreciation: these describe one mechanism seen from different angles, namely how long the insured value stays intact before the discount begins. P&V describes a six-month formula in which the value only starts falling by 1 % per month from the seventh month. The Belgian market commonly offers 6, 12, 24 and sometimes 36 months at full value.

The question to put to your intermediary therefore has two parts, never one. How many months without depreciation, and what monthly percentage after that? A 24-month formula followed by 2 % per month can prove less protective, by year four, than a 12-month formula followed by 1 %.

What happens once the table runs out?

The payout reverts entirely to market value, and agreed value stops having any effect.

Ethias sets the switch at month 73. P&V puts the turning point around five years, or 200,000 km, and states that beyond it the payout will almost always rest on an adjuster's estimate. The same logic applies at most Belgian insurers, with thresholds ranging from four to seven years.

The practical consequence deserves stating bluntly, because it contradicts a widespread reflex: past that threshold, continuing to pay the agreed-value supplement means funding a benefit that will never apply. The point connects to the broader question of the vehicle age at which a full omnium loses its purpose, covered in our comparison of mini-omnium vs full omnium.

Deductible, salvage, VAT: the forgotten subtractions

The figure produced by the table is not the one that reaches your account. Five deductions sit in between, and all of them appear in the contract.

• The deductible. It is automatically taken off the payout, for every claim declared and indemnified. Its type is set out in your particular conditions, not in the general conditions.
• Salvage value. If the insurer takes the vehicle back, it handles the sale and you receive the full payout. If you prefer to keep the wreck, its salvage value is deducted.
• Unborne VAT. VAT is added to the payout but depreciated on the same table, capped at what you effectively and definitively paid. A self-employed driver who reclaimed it receives nothing on that line.
• The proportional rule. If the insured value declared when signing falls short of what should have been declared, the payout is cut in the same proportion. Under-declaring to pay less costs you at the worst possible moment.
• Missing documents. Payment of a total-loss indemnity is conditional on first handing over the registration documents, the keys and the coded cards. One lost key can hold up a file.

Where do you read the clause in your own policy?

Ten minutes are enough, on the PDF your broker handed you or that the company publishes online.

1. Open full-text search and type in turn « valeur assurée », « perte totale », « dépréciation », « dégressivité », « valeur réelle ». Belgian policies are issued in French or Dutch, so search the language of your own document. The table sits within two pages of those words.
2. Note the calculation base. List price or invoice price, excluding or including VAT, factory options in or out, registration tax added or not.
3. Write down the two numbers. Months without depreciation, then monthly percentage. Without both, no comparison between two quotes is possible.
4. Find the switch month to market value. That is the date on which your premium supplement stops meaning anything.
5. Finish with your particular conditions. The personalised document prevails over the standard one, and it names the regime you actually bought.

Is agreed value worth paying for on a used car?

Rarely, and the answer rests on arithmetic rather than doctrine.

Agreed value protects the gap between market price and original price. That gap peaks in the first two years, when a new car loses value fastest, and becomes marginal afterwards. On a four-year-old car bought for €12,000, the original list price no longer means much as a base, and the table will be close to its end anyway.

The reasoning flips for a new vehicle financed on credit or leasing, where the outstanding balance can exceed the resale value during the early years. A driver profile also changes the trade-off, and our personalised quiz frames it in two minutes. To see how each Belgian company builds its table and what it excludes, our ranking of the best car insurers takes them one by one, and the comparison page sets them side by side against your vehicle.

One reservation covers everything above. The figures quoted come from public general conditions, Ethias for the detailed table and P&V documentation for the thresholds. They illustrate Belgian market practice: they do not replace your own particular conditions, which may restrict or adjust the standard regime and which prevail over it.

If the claim has already happened, the ground shifts and the question turns procedural: challenging the survey, calling on legal expenses cover, referring the file to the mediator. Our article on reporting a car insurance claim sets out the deadlines and the documents to gather. The Insurance Ombudsman, the Belgian sector mediator, handles consumer complaints free of charge, and the FSMA, the Belgian financial services and markets authority, supervises insurers and intermediaries. The public financial education portal Wikifin also details how an omnium payout is calculated.

To understand upstream which obligations a policy imposes, and what it will refuse you on the day, our article on forfeiture of cover walks through the clauses almost every Belgian company applies.

This site informs and compares. It is not an insurance intermediary and gives no individual recommendation.