Earthmoving and Heavy Machinery Insurance Australia
Quick answerEarthmoving insurance is two policies doing different jobs. One pays for your machines. The other pays what you owe other people. If your plant is not registered it has no CTP and no road risk, so your public liability cover is all that stands between you and a claim. Ring us on 07 3292 1111.
If you are insuring a home or a car rather than a business, start here instead.
Unregistered plant has no CTP and no road risk.
This page is for earthmoving and civil contractors running excavators, dozers, loaders, graders, rollers and water trucks. One excavator? Excavator insurance. After the policy itself, owned and hired? Plant and equipment insurance.
The limits, excesses and conditions on this page come from the plant wordings we place, the main one effective 23/04/2026. Another insurer's wording will differ, and so will your own schedule. Yours is the one that counts.
Your road risk cover is written to a registered machine
The biggest gap we see, and most owners have never been told it.
CTP is not part of your plant policy. You buy it when you pay registration in your state, and it covers you if you hurt someone. No registration, no CTP.
On the wordings we place, the road risk section answers only for a machine registered with a road authority, or on a temporary permit and only while it is on a public road. Damage cover attaches to your insured property. Liability attaches to your registered insured property. One word apart.
So an unregistered machine that hurts someone, or damages their property, has one place to turn: your business public and products liability cover. Without it, you pay. Not every wording is that blunt, and at least one turns instead on whether being unregistered contributed to the claim.
The case nobody argues about: unregistered, no permit, travelling a public road between jobs. Road risk needs a registered machine and fails. The illegal use exclusion catches it. Tool of trade cannot reach it, because every wording we read stops that write-back once the machine is travelling to or from site. Nothing responds.
An owner rings a direct insurer and puts the excavator on a commercial motor policy. Unregistered, it gets no road risk. He assumes it works like car insurance. It does not.
And it is not non-disclosure. The insurer reads the registration status on the day of the accident and pays for the machine only. Honesty changes nothing.
Then the double whammy. These wordings exclude loss or damage AND liability where the machine was not authorised by law for the use it was put to, so using it illegally can cost the damage cover as well.
Registration changes it. CTP attaches and road risk becomes available, though it does not turn itself on: the machine has to be registered, and we note it as comprehensive insurance on a registered item.
And putting an unregistered machine on a road is against the law. Check yours before you read anything else here.
"I have public liability" does not mean the machine is covered
A public liability policy excludes liability connected with owning, driving or using registered plant. It writes one thing back in: use as a tool of trade, on a site where you are working.
Tool of trade is defined, and written for your trade. Excavating, digging, grading, drilling, scraping, lifting.
The wordings do not even agree on whether tracking across a site counts. Some cover it, others say expressly that it is not included. Same accident, opposite answers.
All of them stop once the machine is travelling to or from site.
If your liability sits with one insurer and your motor with another, do not assume the definitions meet. The gap falls where the machine spends half its life: moving.
Your twenty million is not twenty million for the job you are on
Property in your care, custody and control is excluded, then bought back at a sub-limit that is both the most you get for one incident and the most you get for the whole year.
Two bars on one scale. The first fills the track and the second is a thin sliver beside it.
- The limit on the certificate you hand over$20 million
- Other people's property in your care, custody or control$100,000
Source of every figure in this chart: Illustrative. Your own certificate carries the headline limit. The care, custody and control sub-limit on the plant and construction wordings we read runs from $100,000 to $250,000.
The excess is commonly 10 per cent of the claim or $1,000, whichever is greater. On an $80,000 claim that is $8,000 of your own money. Illustrative only.
And on many wordings the write-back will not stretch to the very thing you were engaged to work on. Crack the driveway you were trenching across and you are arguing about it. Hit the house wall fifty metres away and you are not.
Generic liability wordings often show a higher care and control sub-limit than specialist plant ones. That is not generosity. Specialist insurers meter it tightly because their clients have someone else's property under the machine every day.
Vibration, cracked houses and a batter that lets go
Compacting beside a house. Digging next to a footing. A batter that takes the neighbour's fence with it.
That is vibration, or removal of support. Excluded, then written back at a sub-limit far below your headline limit, unless your schedule says otherwise.
On one wording the full limit comes back if you got a dilapidation report first, or worked to an engineer's plans. Do the paperwork and you have the whole limit.
The jobs that put you outside your own policy
The liability section does not cover work that is:
- demolition
- blasting, or use of explosives
- inside a rail corridor, or on rail platforms
- excavation deeper than ten metres
- wholly underground
Take a demolition or rail job and nothing about the machine changes. Your cover does.
Ring your broker before you quote that work, not after you win it.
Certificates of currency, principals, and the contract you just signed
The head contractor does not have to be listed on your policy to get the benefit of your principal's indemnity. It covers them for your negligence flowing through to them, and nothing for their own.
And liability you take on by signing a contract is excluded unless you would have been liable anyway. Civil subcontracts routinely make you responsible for things that were not your fault, which is an uninsured exposure you signed for.
Send us the insurance clauses before you sign, and we will tell you what your policy will and will not answer.
Your own worker is a workers compensation claim first
An employee hurt on your site is a workers compensation claim, not a public liability one. What a hurt worker can claim is set by your state's law, and public liability can answer where the scheme cannot. It never stands in for the workers compensation you were required to hold. And a subcontractor's policy protects them, not you. Collect the certificate and check the dates.
What we do that a cheap quote does not
Most liability quotes are a turnover figure and a trade description.
We start with the work, and whether any of it lands in the excluded list before you quote it. Then the sub-limits, where earthmoving claims actually get decided. And we note your registered machines as comprehensive, so the road cover is actually there.
We have disclosed our commission on every invoice since 2010. And if an insurer starts doing the wrong thing on a claim, we escalate it.
What actually drives the price
- The split of what you do, by percentage of turnover, and how much you subcontract.
- The deepest excavation you take on.
- The liability limit, and the sub-limits underneath it.
- The fleet: how many machines, what, how old.
- Five years of claims history, and any break in cover.
We will not put a price on this page. A real number needs your fleet, your work and your contracts.
Earthmoving and Heavy Machinery Insurance: your questions answered
How much public liability do earthmoving contractors need?
Related cover and reading
Information current as at 03/10/2026
Know where your cover stops before you win the job.
Tell us the machines, the work you take on and who you contract to. We will tell you which jobs sit outside your policy today.
Call now, most enquiries are settled in one conversation.