Replacement Car: €23 Option or €205 of Rental

With comprehensive (omnium) cover, a replacement car is normally included, whether you are at fault or not. Without it, the option costs €23 to €74 a year and stands against €205 of rental for five days. It depends on your cover level, not on your premium.

Who is entitled to a replacement car after an accident?

It depends on the cover level, and sources do not agree on basic liability. P&V writes that omnium generally includes one, at fault or not, while basic liability (RC) and mini-omnium generally do not, especially if you caused the accident. Test-Achats, which went through 31 contracts from 20 insurers in January 2018, found on the contrary that most insurers supplied one after an accident in Belgium, even under liability cover.

Two points from P&V matter. A higher excess often applies to the lent car. And if the garage lends you a car on a dealer plate, the period is capped at 7 days.

The table is a starting point. Your contract decides.

How many days of replacement car do you get?

Most insurers grant 2 to 10 days, according to P&V and Assurances.be, with one notable exception: at an approved garage, several lend the car for the entire repair. These are the published periods I found.

• Yuzzu, option: 10 days for a breakdown with immobilisation or an undrivable car after an accident, 20 days if the car burns or is declared a write-off, 30 days for theft.
• Ethias Mobility Maxi: 10 days for a repair, 30 days for a total loss (Test-Achats 2018 review, to be confirmed).
• Assistance packages: 5 days at Touring, VAB and Ethias Car & Family Plus, 7 days at Belfius Direct Plus, DVV and Fédérale Assurance.
• Garage dealer plate: 7 days at most.

Five days cover a simple repair. They do not cover a write-off, where the expert often allows only a few days to find another vehicle. Our guide to total loss details that period.

What does a day without a car really cost?

€41 if you rent, €23 if you claim. The gap between the two is the real substance of the trade-off.

On the rental side, Momondo showed on 26 October 2026 that users had paid on average €41 a day for an economy car in Belgium over the previous thirty days, with headline offers at €22 for early November. The two figures frame the spending: €22 is a shop-window floor, €41 a price actually paid.

On the compensation side, the 2024 indicative table, relayed by Test-Achats on 20 August 2025, sets €23 a day for a passenger car. Assurance.be cites €20 in its June 2026 guide. No law imposes this scale, but insurers and magistrates refer to it.

When you are not at fault, the gap between average rental and the flat rate is therefore €90 for five days. Test-Achats adds that compensation can also cover an actual rental, receipts in hand: the flat rate is a benchmark, not a ceiling.

How much does the replacement car option cost?

From €23 to €74 a year, depending on whether you buy the option alone or step up from one assistance package to another. The amounts below come from two dated sources, and neither depends on the driver's profile: they are prices per product.

The three assistance packages were recorded by assistance-auto.be on 17 April 2026, for one vehicle. Yuzzu's figure comes from the sheet published by Mon-Assurance-Auto (price grids of 26 January 2026), which also shows €25 elsewhere on the same page. Ethias offers €161 in Car & Family and €215 in Plus, but the €54 gap pays for more than the replacement car alone. The average of the three net gaps is €59 a year.

The option pays for itself after 1.2 rental days avoided

The arithmetic is short: option price divided by the price of one rental day. At €41 a day, the €49 option (Touring) pays for itself in 1.2 days. Three rental days (€123) already offset two and a half years of premium at €49.

The last column divides the option price by €205, which is five days at €41. Over five years the Yuzzu option costs €115 and the average package €297: you need 0.56 and then 1.45 five-day immobilisations for them to have earned their keep.

These figures assume you do not already have omnium. If you do, the option returns nothing.

Omnium, option, rental or compensation: the head-to-head

Four routes lead to a replacement car, and only one is free by default. Here is the bill for a five-day immobilisation, then for twenty days after a write-off, with rental at €41 a day as the benchmark.

The costliest case is the RC-only driver who is at fault and has no option: €205 for five days, €410 for ten. And it comes on top of the malus from the same accident.

Malus weighs more than the rental

An at-fault claim costs €535 of extra premium over five years under the Belgian bonus-malus scale (0 to 22, premium surcharge after a claim you caused) for the reference profile (the site's own calculation, degree 6 assumed), which is 2.6 times five days of rental at €41. The replacement car is not the item that sinks a claim: it can be priced, compared and settled. The detailed calculation is in the cost of an at-fault claim, and the decision whether to report in report a claim or pay out of pocket.

Method, reference profile and sources

Prices checked on 26 October 2026. The three assistance packages (Touring, Europ Assistance, VAB) come from assistance-auto.be, calculated by the publisher on 17 April 2026 for one vehicle. The Yuzzu option (€23, periods of 10, 20 and 30 days) comes from Yuzzu's options page for the periods and from the sheet reproduced by Mon-Assurance-Auto (grids of 26 January 2026) for the price. That sheet also shows €25: the gap is not explained. The €41 average rental comes from Momondo, the thirty days before 26 October 2026, economy category, all rental purposes combined.

Rules by cover level rest on P&V's guide, on Test-Achats (January 2018 analysis, page from 2020 with no dated update, so to be verified) and on Assurances.be, updated 6 April 2022. The €23 daily compensation is the 2024 indicative table as reported by Test-Achats, article of 20 August 2025. The gaps, break-even points and payback delays are in-house calculations, not quotes.

The site's reference profile (35 years old, Golf 1.5 TSI, Flemish Brabant, no claim for five years, about 15,000 km a year) fixes risk exposure. It does not change these prices, which are published per product. The legal framework is the law of 4 April 2014 on insurance, general explanations are on Wikifin, the financial education portal of the FSMA (Belgium's financial regulator), and the Insurance Ombudsman handles disputes free of charge, including a refused replacement car.

This site compares and calculates. It does not sell insurance, is not an intermediary within the meaning of the law of 4 April 2014 and gives no individual recommendation: speak to your insurer or to a broker licensed by the FSMA. No link is affiliated.

The verdict: €23 if you have no omnium

With omnium, pay nothing more. Without it, the standalone €23 option pays back after half a rental day avoided; an assistance package at €49 or €74 is mainly justified if you have a single car and drive daily. Check the period before the price: five days do not cover a write-off. To compare what each option changes in your policy, run the simulator or the comparison tool, and see the ranking of the best car insurers. The full assistance table is in roadside assistance, and neighbouring options in optional cover.