Usually yes for sudden water from inside the house, and usually no for flood water from outside it. A burst supply line, a failed water heater or an overflowing appliance is the kind of sudden and accidental discharge a standard homeowners policy is written for. Rising water from a river, a storm surge or surface run off across the street is excluded from almost every standard homeowners policy and needs a separate flood policy through the National Flood Insurance Program.
That single line settles most of the anxiety in the first hour. What follows is the detail that decides how much of the claim survives, and almost all of it turns on what you do in the first day.
The duty to mitigate, and why the first hours matter to the carrier
Standard homeowners policies carry a duty to mitigate. The policyholder is expected to take reasonable steps to protect covered property from further damage, and the carrier will generally pay the reasonable costs of doing so. The same clause runs the other way. Damage that grew because nothing was done can be read as neglect rather than as part of the original loss.
This is the part of the policy that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the phone. Water that is extracted on the day is a covered loss being contained. The same water left down over a long weekend has become a second, larger problem that the carrier can argue about.
The flood exclusion, stated plainly
Flood is excluded from almost every standard homeowners policy in the United States, and cover is bought separately through the National Flood Insurance Program administered by FEMA. In this part of New Jersey that exclusion is not academic. Homes along the Passaic River and its tributaries take water in heavy rain, and a homeowner who has never been told about the exclusion finds out about it while standing in a wet basement.
There is a second trap in the same paragraph. Water that comes up through a floor drain or backs up from a sewer is a different exclusion again, and cover for it is commonly sold as an endorsement and is not there by default. The question to ask your agent is specific: is water and sewer backup on my policy, and what is the limit.
Your own declarations page answers all of this, and a wet morning is a poor time to read it for the first time. Your agent can confirm what is on it in a five minute call.
What the adjuster is looking for
An adjuster is reading a file, and a file that answers questions before they are asked moves faster. The water damage restoration standard, ANSI/IICRC S500, sets what a competent file contains, and carriers that reference the standard use it as the benchmark for the documentation they receive.
- A category and class assessment made on arrival, with the reason for each.
- Moisture readings taken at fixed monitoring points, logged on each day the project is active, with temperature, relative humidity, specific humidity and grain depression.
- Photographs that show the moisture meter reading and the affected material in the same frame, so the number can be checked against the wall it came from.
- A record of which materials were removed and why, tied to the category of the water.
- The equipment placed, and the dates it was placed and collected.
A file like that answers the two questions an adjuster has, which are whether the work was necessary and whether it was proportionate. A file of wide angle photographs and a total does not.
What you can do before anyone arrives
- Stop the water at the main if you can reach the valve safely.
- Photograph everything before anything moves, including the source, the standing water and the rooms it reached.
- Keep the damaged material until it has been documented, and photograph anything that has to be thrown out.
- Write down the time you noticed the water and the time you called, because the timeline is part of the mitigation argument.
- Keep receipts for anything you buy to limit the damage.
- Stay out of standing water near outlets, and do not use bleach on wet building materials.
Photographing before anything moves is the one step people skip and cannot recover. Ten photographs taken while the water is still on the floor are worth more to your file than an hour of description later.
Where the restoration company fits, and where it does not
DHL documents the loss to the standard a carrier expects, photographs the damage and takes moisture readings, so you have a complete file to give your insurer. The business does not file, adjust or negotiate the claim, which is regulated work between you and your insurer.
The boundary sits on the other side of that. Filing, adjusting and negotiating the claim are regulated work that belongs between you and your carrier, so the business does none of them, and a restoration company offering to run your claim is offering something it should not.
The mold question that sits underneath the water question
Mold cover is commonly limited by a sublimit rather than excluded outright, and the sublimit is usually far smaller than the water cover it sits inside. This is another reason the drying record matters. A file that shows the material dried to a dry standard inside the window is a file where the mold question does not arise, and mold prevention after a loss is the bridge between the water work and the Mold Remediation side of the business.
The short version
Sudden water from inside the house is generally covered. Flood water from outside it needs a separate policy. Backup through a drain is usually an endorsement. In all three cases the size of the claim that survives depends on how fast the water came out and how well the drying was documented. The method behind that documentation is on the Water Damage Restoration page.