Your landlord's insurance covers the building. Everything you've built inside it is yours to protect.

Three gaps catch business tenants, and they usually surface in the same claim.

The fitout is yours. The commercial kitchen, the retail floor, the treatment rooms, the cabinetry and counters and lighting you paid for. That is your asset, not the landlord's, and their building policy does not touch it. If it is destroyed, you rebuild it, at today's prices, from your own cover or your own pocket.

Your income stops. Your expenses don't. A fire closes you for months. Unless your lease pauses it, the rent is still owed, key staff leave if you cannot pay them, customers find alternatives, and when you finally reopen, trade does not snap back to where it was. In our experience, most business pack policies we review have no business interruption cover at all, or a period too short to survive a rebuild. For business tenants, water damage is the claim we see most often; fire is the one that exposes every gap at once.

Your lease probably requires more than you hold. Most commercial leases oblige the tenant to carry public liability, glass and often business interruption cover as a condition of the lease. Plenty of tenants signed, ticked the box, and have never checked since, which means the gap is not just underinsurance, it can be a lease breach as well. More on that below.

• Business property. Your fitout, business contents, stock and customers' goods in your care, insured for what it costs to replace them, not what they are worth second-hand. A five-year-old commercial oven can still cost $30,000 to replace.
• Business interruption. Covers the gross profit you lose and the fixed expenses that keep running when an insured event stops you trading. The full picture of what it covers and how the indemnity period works is on Business Interruption Insurance; why the period matters so much for a tenant is covered below.
• Public and products liability. Your liability for injuring someone or damaging their property through your business activities. Separate from your landlord's liability; both exist for a reason. See Public Liability Insurance.
• Glass. Internal and external breakage, almost always a lease requirement, cheap, and frequently forgotten.
• Equipment breakdown. Air conditioning, commercial refrigeration, specialist equipment. Whose job this is depends on your lease, which is exactly why we read it.
• Theft. Contents and stock. Worth knowing: insurers commonly require evidence of forced entry for theft from an unattended premises.
• Money. Cash on the premises, in transit and in the till, if your business handles it.
• Portable property. Tools, laptops and equipment that earn their keep away from the premises.
• Cyber. If you hold customer data or payment details, or your systems going down stops you trading.

The number usually goes wrong in one of three quiet ways: the fitout was never separated out from "contents" in anyone's head, the original cost was underestimated, or the sum insured was set at move-in and never touched while the space kept improving around it. For a hospitality venue the fitout can be an entire commercial kitchen and coolroom, the kind of reinstatement that runs from $300,000 well past $1 million as an industry-typical range. For a medical practice it is procedure rooms and specialist fit-out. For retail, the custom shelving, displays and counters that make the shop a shop.

The sum insured needs to be the full replacement cost of everything you have put into and keep in the space: fitout, contents, electronic equipment, furniture, plant, stock and customers' goods, priced as one honest total. This section of a business policy is cheap per thousand dollars of cover, so going small here saves very little and risks a great deal.

And underinsurance does not just mean a smaller pool of money. The same co-insurance mechanism that punishes underinsured buildings applies to contents and fitout claims too: on a partial loss the payout can be scaled down in proportion to how far short your sum insured was, while on a total loss you receive your full sum insured and carry every dollar of the gap yourself. Those two cases are different, and both hurt. See how the co-insurance clause reduces a partial-loss payout, with the maths.

The full product picture lives on Business Interruption Insurance. What belongs on this page is the one decision tenants get wrong: choosing a 12 month indemnity period to shave the premium.

Here is the arithmetic of a bad year. In our experience a total rebuild of commercial premises runs 18 to 24 months, longer when council approvals, engineers and material delays stack up. If your cover expires at month 12 and you reopen at month 15, you carried three months of wages, loan repayments and, unless your lease paused it, rent, with no income and no cover. And reopening is not recovery: trade commonly takes another 6 to 12 months after the doors reopen to climb back to pre-loss levels, because your customers found somewhere else to go in the meantime. A good business interruption policy keeps paying against that lost profit through the indemnity period, even after you reopen, which is exactly why the period has to cover the rebuild plus the recovery, not just the rebuild.

The premium difference between 12 months and 18 or 24 is usually immaterial. The protection difference is the survival of the business. That is advice a direct insurer's website will never volunteer, and it is the most common piece of personal advice we give business tenants.

If a claim does come, the first month matters: make-safe works, the insurer's loss adjuster, your profit-and-loss and BAS records as the evidence of what you earn, decisions about temporary premises and staff, a time excess that commonly runs around 48 hours, and interim progress payments to keep you liquid. That month is where an engaged broker earns their keep, and where a policy bought off a website leaves you managing it alone. The difference between business interruption and a landlord's loss of rent cover is explained in Business Interruption Explained.

The pattern is almost universal. The lease gets signed, the insurance clause gets skimmed, a policy gets bought, and the two documents never meet again. Your insurer does not check your lease. Your landlord usually does not either, until a renewal or an incident makes them. If something happens while you are in breach of the lease's insurance obligations, you can face a separate exposure to the landlord on top of whatever the claim itself costs.

On the liability figure: $20 million is the benchmark most leases specify, and it is our recommended floor whether your lease says so or not. What the limit actually protects, and why it is not overkill, is on Public Liability Insurance.

Often yours, through your public liability policy. When a long-term contractor slipped at a Queensland engineering business and turned out to have no injury cover of their own, CIB lodged the claim the moment a legal demand arrived; the insurer granted indemnity and is running the defence at its own cost. The full story, and why every business with contractors, cleaners or delivery people on site carries this exposure, is on Public Liability Insurance.

• Your lease gets read. We ask for it, first conversation. It tells us what cover the lease requires versus what you hold, who is responsible for the glass and the air conditioning, what make-good you are carrying, and whether you are in breach right now. A detail that's easy to miss: some leases transfer the obligation to insure the property owner's fitout to the tenant, and if yours does, your sum insured has to carry it.
• Your fitout gets valued properly. Not "what's your contents sum insured?" but "walk me through the space: what did the fitout cost, what equipment is fixed, what stock do you hold at peak?" The number comes from the answers, not from last year's schedule.
• Your indemnity period gets pushed, and you see the working. Default 18 months, 24 wherever we can, 12 only on your instruction. The premium difference is small; the difference at claim time is the business.
• You get personal advice. What is in the policy, what is not, and what could hurt you at claim time, before you pay, not after.
• You have us there when it goes wrong. A claim gets lodged and run for you by your account manager and our claims team, at the exact moment you have a business to hold together.

If a gap turns up against your lease, we do not note it for later. We fix it at placement and put what changed, and why, in writing.