Insurance does not refund the value of what you lost. It returns the specific items that were still on your body or nearby when the raid ended and that no other player took. That single sentence is the whole difference between the players who budget correctly and the ones who believe they are covered and then are not.
One caveat sits above everything else in this guide: per patch 1.1.0.0’s own changelog, insurance is disabled entirely in PvP Season and applies only in the PvP Zone and PvE Zone modes. If you are playing a Season 1: KORD BREACH seasonal character, the return timers, insurers and matrix below do not apply to you at all — nothing you carry into a PvP Season raid comes back through insurance, insured or not. The community-maintained Escape from Tarkov Wiki states the same thing directly on its Insurance page: “In Season 1: KORD BREACH, the insurance service is not offered by any trader.” Everything past this paragraph describes PvP Zone and PvE Zone play.
No return-probability figures appear below — the wiki and the patch notes state return timers and fees precisely, but neither publishes a chance of an item actually surviving looting, and we have not measured it ourselves. What follows is the mechanic and the decision, re-confirmed against patch 1.1.5.1 (15 September 2026, the current patch) and Season 1: KORD BREACH; nothing about insurance has changed since patch 1.1.0.0 introduced these rules on 3 August 2026.
The matrix: what actually comes home
Read this by slot, not by item value. The right-hand column is the only one you act on.
| Slot | If you die and nobody loots you | If a player kills and loots you | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secure container | Returns immediately, always | Returns immediately, always | Put anything you cannot replace here first |
| Weapon in hands | Insurance may return it | Gone — this is the first thing taken | Insure it, but treat it as spent |
| Armour and rig | Insurance may return it | Usually gone | Insure; expect loss in PvP-heavy raids |
| Backpack loot | Not insurable as loot | Gone | Never carry stash value you would miss |
| Headwear and comms | Insurance may return it | Frequently taken | Insure the expensive half only |
| Meds and ammo in pockets | Not returned | Gone | Budget as consumed every raid |
The pattern is blunt: the more useful an item is to the person who killed you, the less likely insurance is to give it back. Insurance is protection against the environment, against Scavs, against a fall, and against your own mistakes. It is close to useless against a player who wants your gun.
Uninsurable outright, regardless of slot: secure containers, keys, melee weapons, armbands, non-secure containers (backpacks, rigs and cases as items, as opposed to what they hold), thermal vision devices and sights, plus every consumable — provisions, meds, ammunition and grenades. Part of that list is also protected from looting: per the wiki, secure containers, the Compass, armbands and melee weapons cannot be looted off your body either — except the Cultist knife, which can be.
What the three insurers actually cost you in time
Since 1.1.0.0, three traders sell insurance, and the trade-off between them is speed against expiry, not speed against price:
| Insurer | Item return delay | Time you have to collect before it’s lost | Fee vs. the others |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jaeger | 1–2 hours (fastest) | 1 day (24h) — expires soonest | Most expensive |
| Prapor | 12–20 hours | 7 days (168h) | Mid |
| Therapist | 6–10 hours | 10 days (240h) — most forgiving window | Mid |
Higher loyalty level with an insurer reduces its fee by an unpublished amount — check your own trader screen for the number, since it is not documented anywhere we could verify. Two Hideout and edition effects change the return delay specifically, not the fee: the “Intelligence Center” Hideout module at level 2 cuts return time by 20% (30% with the elite Hideout Management skill), and the Edge of Darkness edition cuts it by 30%. The Unheard edition instead doubles the collection window before an unclaimed return is lost.
Two mechanical traps sit outside the table. First, ending a raid as Missing in Action — failing to extract before the timer runs out, or dying to dehydration — voids the return of insured equipped items entirely, even though the raid technically ended without you being looted. Second, insuring a container only insures the container: a magazine you insured returns empty, and an insured backpack or rig returns without the meds or ammo you had stored inside it. Insurers also will not bring back anything lost in The Lab, The Labyrinth, or on Icebreaker, regardless of insurer or loyalty level.
The four-line pre-raid price
Before you queue, work out one number: what this raid costs you if it goes badly. Do it in this order and stop as soon as the answer makes you uncomfortable.
- Add the value of anything not in your secure container. That is your exposed amount.
- Subtract nothing for insurance. Assume zero return. If a return arrives, it is a bonus, not a plan.
- Compare the exposed amount against what one bad day costs you. If losing this kit three times in a row would stop you playing, the kit is too expensive.
- Then decide whether the raid’s objective justifies the exposure. A task turn-in often does. “I felt like a good run” does not.
The reason step 2 is written the way it is: players who mentally deduct an expected insurance return end up running kits they cannot actually afford, because the return arrives late, arrives partial, or does not arrive. Budget on the worst case and the good cases take care of themselves.
When insuring is and is not worth it
- Cheap kit, quiet map, mostly Scav contact → insure. This is the case insurance was built for and it works well.
- Expensive kit, hot map, players everywhere → insure anyway, but assume it is gone. The premium is small relative to the kit; the expectation should still be total loss.
- Loot-run kit you deliberately made worthless → insurance barely matters either way. The point of that kit is that losing it is free.
- Anything you genuinely cannot replace → it should not be in an insurable slot at all. It belongs in the secure container, or in the stash.
The stash-side half nobody mentions
Loss is not only what leaves your body. Every item you bring out and keep occupies stash space, and stash space is the resource that quietly throttles new players. A kit that returns via insurance is only a gain if you have room to keep it and a use for it; three insured rigs you will never wear are three slots you cannot use for task items.
So the honest full accounting of a raid is: exposed value lost, minus anything returned, minus the stash space the returns now occupy. Most new players track the first term only, which is why their stash fills up while their rouble count does not move.
If you are running a seasonal character, the same logic applies to time as well as roubles — the season time planner prices your remaining schedule in raids, and a kit that takes three raids to rebuild is a kit that costs three raids of progress. Whether a rough seasonal roll makes that worse is a separate question, handled by the modifier trade-off scorer.
Figures we left out on purpose
- Exact insurance fees in roubles. These are gated behind loyalty level and item value and neither source we checked publishes a table of them. Check your own client on the day.
- The size of the loyalty-level discount. The wiki and patch notes both confirm it exists but neither states a percentage.
- Any claim about how likely a return actually is if you were killed and looted. Neither source publishes a probability, and we have not measured it ourselves.
Sources
- Insurance — Escape from Tarkov Wiki (community-maintained Fandom wiki, not an official BSG source), re-read in full 22 September 2026 — return-delay and collection-window figures per insurer, the Hideout/edition modifiers, the uninsurable-items list, the MIA and insured-container exceptions, and its own note that “In Season 1: KORD BREACH, the insurance service is not offered by any trader.”
- Secure container — Escape from Tarkov Wiki (community-maintained Fandom wiki) — the always-returns row of the matrix.
- Stash — Escape from Tarkov Wiki (community-maintained Fandom wiki) — stash space as the constraint behind the final section. Checked 22 September 2026: this URL now redirects to the wiki’s Hideout page and we could not confirm a dedicated Stash article still exists there — the stash-space point in the final section is our own reasoning about a documented game mechanic (finite stash slots), not a re-verified wiki quote.
- Patch 1.1.0.0 — Escape from Tarkov official news, re-read 22 September 2026 — confirms insurance is disabled in PvP Season and applies only to PvP Zone/PvE Zone, the addition of Jaeger as an insurer, and that higher loyalty levels discount the fee.
- Patch 1.1.5.1 — Escape from Tarkov official news, read 22 September 2026 — the current patch; contains no insurance changes, confirming the 1.1.0.0 rules above are still current.
