How Can I Tell How Much My TV Is Worth?
Check its current resale price online, by model number, on sites like eBay or Amazon, not what you paid for it.
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Figuring out what the insurer owes you for the TV
What matters for your claim is whether your policy pays actual cash value or replacement cost. Actual cash value takes that resale price and subtracts depreciation for the TV's age, so a five-year-old television is worth a lot less than it sold for new. Replacement cost coverage pays what it takes to buy a comparable new TV today, regardless of what the old one had depreciated to. Your declarations page says which one you have. Either way, you'll want the model number, which is usually on a sticker on the back, and a receipt or bank statement if you still have one. Without that, a photo of the TV in your home, from before the theft, helps support the claim.
Know what your policy actually pays before you need it
If your policy pays actual cash value, a stolen TV might owe you far less than replacing it costs. Comparing coverage now shows what other policies pay for the same loss.
What else gets paid out when the TV is stolen
A stolen TV almost never comes alone. If someone broke in and took the television, they likely took other things too, and the payout for all of it draws from the same personal property limit on your policy. That limit is usually a percentage of your dwelling coverage, often around half, so if your house is insured for $300,000, personal property might be capped near $150,000 total for everything stolen or damaged in the claim, not per item. The TV competes with the laptop, the jewelry, and anything else on the list for that same pool of money.
Jewelry, watches, and furs usually have their own sub-limit inside that personal property coverage, often a few thousand dollars total regardless of what the stolen pieces were worth. Cash has a sub-limit too, often just a few hundred dollars. A TV doesn't usually fall into one of these restricted categories, so it's paid out of the general personal property limit rather than a special one, but if the theft included jewelry or cash alongside the television, those lower caps might mean you recover less on those items than the TV itself cost.
Your deductible applies once per claim, not once per item. If the deductible is $1,000 and the total loss, TV included, comes to $4,000, the insurer pays $3,000. That math changes what's worth filing. A single older TV stolen on its own might not clear the deductible by much, especially under actual cash value, where depreciation has already brought its worth down. Add a laptop, a camera, or jewelry to the same claim and the total can move well past the deductible, which is part of why documenting everything taken matters as much as documenting the TV.
If the theft happened somewhere other than the house, in a car or while traveling, most homeowners policies still cover it, usually at a reduced limit, often around 10 percent of the personal property total, for things stolen away from home. A TV is an unusual thing to have with you on the road, but the same reduced limit would apply to a portable one taken from a car or hotel room. Check the declarations page for how that off-premises figure is written, since it affects what a stolen item is worth to the claim depending on where it was taken from.
Figuring out what the TV was worth when you no longer have it
Without the TV in hand, the insurer relies on what you can show about it, and the strength of that evidence can shift the payout. A model number from an old receipt, a credit card statement, or even a photo that shows the set clearly enough to read a brand name gives the adjuster something concrete to price. Some people keep none of this, and that's common, but it means the claim leans more on your own description of the size, brand, and approximate age, which an adjuster may price conservatively if nothing backs it up.
If you genuinely have nothing, retailer price histories can sometimes fill the gap. A big-box electronics seller or site like Amazon often keeps old listings or reviews dated to when a model was current, which can help pin down roughly what a comparable TV cost new and when it was on the market. That's useful for both actual cash value and replacement cost claims, since either way the insurer needs a starting price before applying depreciation or finding today's equivalent.
Home inventory apps and even a simple video walkthrough of your house, done before anything happens, solve this problem ahead of time. A slow pan across the living room that catches the TV on its stand, timestamped and stored somewhere other than the house itself like cloud storage or email, is often enough to confirm a model existed and roughly when it was bought. Insurers see this kind of documentation often enough that an unprompted video isn't viewed with suspicion. It just makes the claim faster to settle because there's less to establish.
Worth noting, too, is that the size and type of TV matters more than people expect once you're estimating value without a receipt. A 42-inch set and an 85-inch set from the same year can differ by a few thousand dollars, and OLED, QLED, and standard LED models hold different prices even at the same screen size. If you're reconstructing the claim from memory, write down everything you recall, the approximate screen size, whether it was a smart TV, roughly how many years old it was, since each detail narrows the price range the adjuster has to work with and reduces the chance of a lowball estimate sticking.
Before anything happens
Pull up your declarations page and check whether personal property is actual cash value or replacement cost, and what the off-premises and sub-limits are. Then take a quick video of the TV and anything else worth claiming.
