Car insurance for a provisional driver
A provisional driver can be insured either as the policyholder on their own learner policy, or as a named driver on somebody else's. Which is cheaper depends almost entirely on how many hours you will actually drive.
The honest answer on cost
Nobody can tell you what your premium will be, including us, and any site that publishes a single figure is showing you somebody else's price. It depends on your age, your postcode, the car, how long you have held the provisional and the provider's own view of all that.
What we can tell you is the shape of the decision, because that does not change:
- A handful of hours before a test: short-term cover is almost always cheapest
- Regular practice over months: an annual or long learner policy usually wins on total cost
- Practising in your own car: your options narrow, because several providers will not cover it
The DVSA's own figure is that the average learner needs around 45 hours of professional lessons plus 22 hours of private practice. Tempcover, Cuvva and Adrian Flux all cite it. Twenty-two hours is the number to do your own sums against, because it is roughly the point where hourly cover stops being the cheap option.
Age is the first filter
This is the fastest way to rule providers in or out, and it is published:
- Adrian Flux publishes the lowest minimum at 16, and says explicitly that it covers
- Tempcover and GoShorty both go 17 to 75
- Dayinsure and Cuvva stop at 50
- Marmalade stops at 34
If you are a 55-year-old learner, that list just went from fourteen providers to a handful, and no comparison site will tell you that before you have entered your details.
What else moves the price
The car matters more than learners expect. Insurance groups run 1 to 50, and a learner policy on a group 30 car is a different proposition from one on a group 3 hatchback. If you have a choice of car to practise in, that choice is worth more than shopping around.
Some policies are telematics-based, which means a black box and often a curfew. The RAC makes a point on its own page of saying its cover has no curfew on your own car, contrasting itself with box policies. If you need to practise in the evening, ask before you buy.
Read the restrictions, not the headline
Cuvva's cover is cheap per hour and capped at three hours of driving in a day, between 7am and 10pm. For topping up practice that is fine. For an intensive week before a test it is no use at all, and the cap is not what the page leads with.
Anything above about what the law requires is Great Britain law and comes from GOV.UK. Anything about a provider comes from that provider's own published material, read on 18 September 2026. How we check.
