Your landlord's insurance covers the building. Everything you've built inside it is yours to protect.
The fitout you paid for, the stock on your shelves, the equipment you rely on, and the income that stops if you're ever forced to close. None of that is on your landlord's policy.
Fitout is the most underinsured cover we see, routinely insured for half or less of what it would cost to put back.
Not quite your situation? If you own the building you trade from, see Business owner-occupiers.
Your business is what you've built. The building is just where you run it from. That distinction feels obvious until something goes wrong, because the walls and the roof belong to the landlord's insurer, and everything inside them, and every dollar of income the space produces, belongs to yours. Most business tenants guessed their fitout number at move-in and never looked at it again, and the covers that actually decide whether a business survives a closure are the ones we most often find missing. Not panic territory. Worth an hour of checking, though.
What does your landlord's insurance actually cover?
Quick answerThe building: the structure, the roof, the walls, usually the services built into them. It does not cover your fitout, your contents, your stock, your equipment, or a single dollar of the income you lose while the premises can't be used. If the building burns, the landlord's insurer rebuilds the shell. Everything else lands on your policy, or on you.
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.
What does a business tenant actually need to insure?
Quick answerThe core, for almost every tenant: business property (your fitout, contents, stock and customer goods) at full replacement cost, business interruption on your gross profit, public and products liability, glass as your lease requires, theft, and money cover if you handle cash. Depending on the business: equipment breakdown, portable property, and cyber. The cover most often skipped is business interruption, because it insures something invisible.
- 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.
Who insures the fitout you paid for?
Quick answerYou do, and in our experience it is the most under-insured category we review. Fitout means everything fixed to the space that cannot be packed up and moved: shopfitting, cabinetry, partitioning, plumbing and electrical work, flooring, lighting, signage. In our experience it is routinely insured at half or less of what reinstatement would actually cost, and building materials cost around 30 per cent more than they did three years ago (Insurance Council of Australia), so an old guess is further behind than it looks.
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.
How long would your business survive if you couldn't trade?
Quick answerBusiness interruption insurance covers the income your business loses when an insured event stops you trading: lost gross profit, the fixed expenses that keep running, and the extra cost of trading from a temporary premises. The decision that makes or breaks it is the indemnity period. Our default is 18 months, we recommend 24 wherever we can, and 12 is the floor we place only on a client's express instruction.
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.
What insurance does your lease actually require you to hold?
Quick answerA standard commercial lease typically requires the tenant to hold public liability cover, commonly at $20 million, glass cover for the tenancy, and often business interruption insurance for a specified minimum period. Many tenants are in breach without knowing it, because nobody checks: the insurer just issues the policy, and the gap surfaces when the landlord asks for a certificate of currency, or after a claim.
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.
What do we actually do for business tenants?
Quick answerWe read your lease, value your fitout properly with open questions instead of a form field, push the indemnity period to where it protects you and explain why, give you personal advice on what is and is not in the policy, and stand beside you at claim time with an account manager rather than a call centre.
- 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 driven 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.
For Business Owner Tenants: your questions answered
My landlord has building insurance. What do I still need to insure?
Does my insurance need to cover the fitout if it was already there when I moved in?
What is business interruption insurance, and do I really need it?
My lease says I need $20 million public liability. Is that standard?
How do I work out the right sum insured for my contents and fitout?
What happens to my insurance if I close temporarily or the premises sits vacant?
I'm starting a new business. What insurance do I need before I open the doors?
My industry is hard to insure. Can you actually place it?
Related cover and reading
The information on this page is general in nature and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Before acting on it, consider whether it is appropriate for your circumstances. Where the information relates to a particular insurance product, consider the relevant Product Disclosure Statement before making a decision.
Last reviewed: 28/07/2026
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