What Is an Inland Marine Floater Policy?
It's separate coverage for a specific valuable item, like jewelry or art, insured for its full appraised value wherever it goes.
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Your homeowners policy caps what it pays for certain categories, and jewelry is usually the tightest one, often a few thousand dollars total for theft, no matter what your actual pieces are worth. A floater removes that cap for the one item you schedule. You get it appraised, list it on the floater with that value, and it's covered for loss or theft at that amount, at home or away, without the usual deductible in most cases. Check your policy's jewelry limit against what you own to see if you need one.
If your jewelry limit is $2,500 and the ring alone appraises near $8,000, that gap is what you'd cover out of pocket after a theft. A floater closes it for a cost that's usually small next to the exposure. Comparing coverage now is worth more than finding out the hard way what your policy would actually pay.
How a floater is different from just raising your personal property limit
Some insurers let you raise the blanket jewelry sublimit instead of scheduling a specific item, and it looks like an easier fix. It usually isn't the same protection. A higher sublimit still covers jewelry as a category, often with a per-item cap buried inside it, and it can still carry a deductible and exclusions for mysterious disappearance, meaning the piece is just gone with no evidence of theft. A floater names your engagement ring, your watch, or your grandmother's necklace specifically, insures it for the appraised value you put on file, and typically covers that broader set of causes, including losing it off a dock or down a drain.
Proving what you owned matters more than people expect until they're filing a claim. For scheduled items, the appraisal you got when you set up the floater is most of that proof already, since it describes the piece, its stones or materials, and its value at a point in time. For everything else in your house, insurers generally want something dated from before the loss. Photos, receipts, a video walkthrough of your rooms and closets, and serial numbers where they exist all help. Doing this once, now, and keeping a copy somewhere other than the house, saves weeks of back and forth after a break-in.
Appraisals for a floater age. Gem prices, gold prices, and art markets move, and most insurers expect a re-appraisal every few years to keep the scheduled value current. If you insured a ring at $8,000 eight years ago and never updated it, you could be underinsured now, paying for coverage that no longer matches what the piece is worth. The paperwork is simple when you already have the original appraisal to work from.
Not everything worth scheduling is obviously a valuable. Musical instruments, cameras, coin or stamp collections, and furs often fall under the same tight sublimits as jewelry, and the same logic applies. If an item would be expensive or impossible to replace exactly, and your policy's category limit falls short of what it's worth, that's the test for whether it belongs on a floater rather than left to the general personal property coverage.
What counts as proof, and what else besides jewelry gets scheduled
Insurers settle a scheduled item based on the appraisal on file, so the documentation question is mostly solved at the point you set up the floater. What trips people up is everything else in the house that a thief might take along with the jewelry box. Electronics, tools, a bike, the contents of a closet. For those, the burden falls back on you to show what you owned and what it was worth, and that's much harder to do from memory after the fact than most people expect.
A simple way to handle it is a home inventory done once and updated when you buy something significant. Walk through each room with your phone, open drawers and closets, narrate what's there. Keep receipts for anything expensive, and note serial numbers on electronics and equipment. Store a copy of all of it somewhere other than the house, like a cloud folder or email to yourself, since the inventory is no good if it was on the laptop that got stolen too.
Jewelry is the category people ask about most, but it's not the only one with a sublimit that can fall short. Cash and currency usually have a low cap, often a few hundred dollars, and that cap doesn't move no matter how much you keep in the house. Firearms, silverware, coin and stamp collections, and furs are frequently grouped with jewelry under the same kind of tight category limit. Cameras and musical instruments sometimes fall under a general electronics or business property sublimit that was never meant to cover a serious collection.
The test is the same for all of them. Compare what the item is worth to the category cap on your declarations page, and see how much of a gap you'd be covering yourself after a loss. If the gap is small, scheduling it may not be worth the trouble of getting an appraisal. If it's not, a floater works the same way for a cello or a coin collection as it does for a ring, insuring the specific item for its appraised value instead of leaving it to compete for space under a cap built for an average household's jewelry drawer.
Before you move on
Pull your declarations page and find the jewelry or valuables sublimit. Compare it to what your pieces are actually worth. If there's a gap, that's what a floater would close, and getting an appraisal is the first step.
