People ask me this more than anything else in the trade: how big a safe do i actually need. Usually they’ve already bought one before they ask, which is the wrong order to do things in, and usually it’s too small for what they’re putting in it.
The Safe You Buy at a Hardware Store Isn’t the Safe You Need #
Most home safes on the market are built and rated for cash and paperwork. Passports, a bit of jewellery, maybe a firearm. They’re not built with a serious collection in mind, and the rating on the box reflects that. A $600 safe from a hardware chain might be perfectly fine for what it was designed to hold, and completely wrong for a painting worth six figures or a cabinet of jewellery and small objects worth more than the house it sits in.
I’ve fitted plenty of these for clients who thought they’d done the responsible thing, and the honest answer, every time, was that the safe was never rated for what ended up going in it. Nobody sat down and did the sum.
The Standard That Actually Matters, And Why It Is Not an Australian One #
Here is the part that surprises people. Australia had a safe and strongroom standard, AS/NZS 3809, and Standards Australia withdrew it in December 2019 without replacing it. We also have no independent safe-testing laboratory here, which Chubb states plainly in its own guidance to policyholders. So when a brochure says a safe is “Australian rated”, that grade has almost always been assigned by the manufacturer.
What I specify against instead is the certification a tested product genuinely carries: EN 1143-1, the European standard that grades burglary resistance in resistance units from Grade 0 upward, or the UL ratings used in the States, TL-15 and TL-30 for safes and UL 608 for vault doors. Those involve an independent lab attacking the unit with real tools on a clock. That is a number worth quoting.
One thing worth knowing: Australia doesn’t have an independent testing body separately certifying every safe against this standard the way some overseas markets do. So the rating on a product is only as good as the manufacturer behind it, which is exactly why I stick to brands with a genuine track record rather than whatever’s cheapest at the time.
The Formula I Actually Use #
There’s a rule of thumb that’s been knocking around the insurance side of this industry for a while, and it lines up with what I’d recommend anyway: a safe’s cash rating should sit at roughly ten percent of the value of what it’s protecting. Chubb publishes this exact guidance in its own client material on jewellery and valuables safes, recommending a minimum cash rating equal to ten percent of the schedule value, so a collection insured at $450,000 would call for a safe with a minimum cash rating around $45,000. It’s a genuinely useful starting point, not a hard legal requirement, but it’s the kind of number that gets you talking to an underwriter in the same language.
What I add on top of that, from the trade side rather than the insurance side, is: don’t just size the safe to the dollar figure and stop there. Think about what’s actually going in it. Paintings need different handling to jewellery. A cabinet of small objects has different space and humidity considerations to a single large canvas rolled in a tube. The rating tells you how hard it is to crack. It doesn’t tell you whether the thing fits properly or sits in good condition once it’s in there.
Bolted Down or It’s Barely a Safe at All #
Here’s the thing that annoys me most in this trade, and I’ll say it plainly: a safe that isn’t properly bolted to the structure is not much better than a very heavy box. I’ve seen genuinely well-rated safes sitting on a concrete floor, unfixed, because the installer didn’t want the hassle or the client didn’t want the mess. Two people with a trolley and twenty minutes can walk an unbolted safe straight out the door, rating be damned.
Anything under around 400kg should be bolted, no exceptions in my book. It’s a small job compared to buying the safe in the first place, and it’s the difference between a genuine security investment and an expensive paperweight. It’s also the kind of basic install detail the Australian Security Industry Association (ASIAL) would expect from a properly accredited installer, not an afterthought tacked on if there’s time left in the day.
The Alarm Has to Cover the Safe, Not Just the Room #
This one gets missed constantly. A safe sitting in a room that’s covered by a monitored alarm sounds secure, until you realise the sensor only picks up someone moving through the doorway, not someone working directly on the safe itself. If an attack on the safe doesn’t trigger anything until the thief is already leaving the room, you’ve lost most of the value of having a monitored system at all.
The fix is straightforward: make sure the safe’s specific location is covered, not just the general area, and that the two systems are actually talking to each other rather than sitting side by side doing their own thing.
One Safe Isn’t Always Enough #
For larger collections I’ll often recommend a proper vault or strongroom rather than a single safe, and for high-value jewellery specifically, a second, smaller safe kept separate from the main one. It splits the risk. If one is ever compromised, the whole collection isn’t sitting in the same box.
It’s not the answer everyone wants to hear, because it costs more than one safe does. But I’d rather tell a client that upfront than have them find out the hard way that everything they owned was behind a single door.
Insurers Care About This More Than You’d Think #
I’m not in the insurance game myself, and I don’t pretend to be. But I’ve had enough conversations alongside brokers and clients to know that a properly specified, properly installed safe genuinely matters when a collection’s being underwritten. Whether it moves the needle on price is a conversation for your own broker, not me. What I can tell you is that a mismatched or unbolted safe is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a dispute if you ever need to make a claim, because it’s an easy thing for an insurer to point to after the fact.
If you haven’t had an honest look at where your collection actually stands, a proper security assessment is a cheaper way to find out than discovering the gap after something’s gone. I’d rather spend an hour walking a property and pointing out what’s wrong than have a client ring me after a loss asking what could’ve been done differently.
What I Tell Every New Client #
Get the collection valued properly first. Work out the real number, not a guess. Then size the safe or vault to that number, using the EN 1143-1 grade or UL rating as the actual reference point rather than a sales brochure, and make sure it’s bolted and properly alarm-integrated before you consider the job finished. If you skip any one of those steps, you’ve got a safe that looks the part and doesn’t actually do the job it was bought for.
Sixteen years in, that’s still the most common gap I find: not a bad safe, just the wrong one for what ended up inside it.