Your water heater dies on a Sunday. Your oven quits two days before Thanksgiving. This is the exact moment a home warranty is supposed to earn its keep. Select Home Warranty is one of the more visible names selling that promise, mostly because of how hard it advertises and how low its starting price looks. But a cheap monthly rate and real value aren’t the same thing, and that gap is where most of the questions about this company actually live. Here’s what it covers, what it costs, and where it tends to let people down.
What Is Select Home Warranty?
It’s a New Jersey company that’s been selling home warranty contracts since 2012. It covers most of the U.S., minus a small handful of states. Three plans, a few add-ons, nothing especially complicated on paper.
What stands out is the positioning. Select isn’t trying to be the premium option with white-glove service and a huge contractor bench. It’s competing on price. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but it means homeowners who sign up here are making a trade. Lower bill, in exchange for less certainty that a given claim gets approved without a fight.
Plans and CoveragePlans and Coverage
Three tiers. Appliances, systems, or both. Compared to warranty companies that make you build a custom plan from twenty modules, this is refreshingly simple.
Bronze Care
Appliances only, refrigerator, range, dishwasher, built-in microwave, washer and dryer. Good fit if your HVAC and plumbing are newer but your kitchen equipment is getting up there in years. No point paying for system coverage you won’t touch for a decade.
Gold Care
Flip side of Bronze. HVAC, electrical, plumbing, water heater, ductwork. No appliances at all. Makes the most sense in an older house, where the systems are the actual financial risk, not the fridge.
Platinum Care
Bronze and Gold combined, plus garage door openers, ceiling fans, and plumbing stoppage coverage. And here’s the thing, it only costs a few dollars more per month than either single plan. Which makes it the more sensible buy for most people. Why pay twice to get half the coverage each time?
Optional Add-ons
Pool and spa coverage, septic systems, a second fridge, that kind of thing. Only worth it if you actually own the equipment; otherwise skip it. One nice touch: roof leak coverage comes standard on all three core plans. A lot of competitors charge extra for that.
How Much Does Select Home Warranty Cost?
Somewhere around $40 to $50 a month, depending on your plan, your state, and whether you pay monthly or up front for the year. Platinum runs only slightly above Bronze or Gold, so bundling tends to beat buying the narrower plan and hoping you never need the other one.
Then there’s the service fee. Every time a technician gets dispatched, you are paying somewhere between $60 and $75, whether the fix takes ten minutes or three hours. That part’s normal across the industry.
The number that actually matters more than the monthly premium, though, is the per-item payout cap. A lot of components top out in the low hundreds of dollars. Fine for garbage disposal. Not so fine if a whole HVAC system needs replacing and the cap barely dents the bill.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Cheaper entry point than most national competitors, reasonable if you mainly want a basic safety net, not full replacement-cost coverage.
- Roof leak coverage included free, which saves the add-on fee some competitors tack on.
- Three simple tiers make it easy to match a plan to what your home actually needs.
Cons
- Payout caps on individual items run low, so a big repair might only get partially covered.
- Complaint volume is high for a company this size, claim denials and slow refunds come up again and again.
- Cancelling isn’t always smooth. Some customers report retention calls continuing even after the policy’s already cancelled.
How the Claims Process WorksHow the Claims Process Works
Purchase a Plan
There’s a waiting period, usually around 30 days, before you can file anything. Standard across the industry, but worth knowing going in.
Submit a Claim
Online, by phone, or by email. Select wants the issue reported within a few days of it happening. Miss that window and it’s apparently been used as grounds for denial in some cases, so don’t sit on it.
Technician Assignment
You don’t pick the contractor. Select assigns one from its own network. Response time is usually a couple of business days, longer if it’s a weekend or holiday.
Repair or Replacement
Claim gets approved, technician does the work, you pay the trade fee. If the item’s beyond repair, Select either replaces it or pays out based on depreciated value, capped at whatever your plan allows for that category.
Customer Reviews and Reputation
Mixed. Genuinely mixed, not just “some good, some bad” as a hedge. Some review platforms skew heavily negative. Others show a majority of four- and five-star ratings. That’s where Select Home Warranty differs from a company with a clean, consistent reputation one way or the other.
The pattern that emerges: small, straightforward claims tend to go fine. People are satisfied. Bigger, more expensive claims, the ones where the payout cap actually comes into play, are where the complaints cluster. Praise tends to center on price. Complaints tend to center on denials and how long it takes to sort out a refund or dispute.
Is Select Home Warranty Legit?Is Select Home Warranty Legit?
Yes. Licensed, been around over a decade, not a scam by any reasonable definition. It has a public BBB profile with a rating in the B range, despite a complaint count that’s high relative to its size.
Legit and good are two different questions, though. Being a real, accountable business doesn’t mean every claim gets approved without friction, it just means there’s a paper trail and a regulator you can go to if things go sideways.
Select Home Warranty vs Other Home Warranty CompaniesSelect Home Warranty vs Other Home Warranty Companies
Against bigger names like Choice Home Warranty or American Home Shield, Select generally wins on price, lower premium, lower service fee. Unlike some competitors that use direct-dispatch and skip the reimbursement paperwork, Select still runs the more traditional model, and that’s an area it gets dinged for. Its contractor network is smaller too, which can matter if you are outside a major metro area.
On paper, the cost advantage looks good. In practice, that advantage gets eaten into by the coverage caps and the smaller network, not by the sticker price.
Is Select Home Warranty Worth It?
Depends what you are actually optimizing for. Want the lowest monthly bill and can live with modest payout limits? Select’s a reasonable pick, especially if your home’s appliances and systems are in decent working order already.
Own something expensive, a high-end HVAC system, say, or want a smoother claims process with higher ceilings? The caps here might end up costing you more than a pricier competitor would have, over the life of the contract.
Common Questions About Select Home Warranty
Does Select Home Warranty let you choose your own contractor? No, generally. They dispatch from their own network.
Is there a waiting period before coverage starts? Yes, about 30 days from purchase, standard for the industry.
Can you cancel a Select Home Warranty policy? You can, though some customers say the refund and cancellation process took longer than expected, and involved more retention calls than they’d have liked.
Final Verdict
Select Home Warranty works fine for homeowners who want basic, cheap protection and go in with realistic expectations about the caps. It’s a worse fit if you have got high-value systems or appliances, or if you have been burned by a warranty company before and now care more about claim reliability than the monthly rate. Given the complaint history, read the actual contract limits before you sign, don’t just go off the advertised price.
