Your office is worth more than the desks in it.
Quick answerOn the wordings we place, there is no policy called office insurance. What we arrange instead is a business pack with the office sections chosen on purpose, one decision at a time. Accounting and legal practices, consultants, medical rooms and agencies can ring us on 07 3292 1111 to work out which ones apply.
Tell us what your office does and where it sits. We will talk you through which sections apply to it, and which ones do not.
If you are insuring a home or a car rather than a business, start here instead.
What an office-based business actually buys is a business pack with the office sections chosen on purpose: the fit-out you paid for, the computers and furniture, the laptops that go home at night, the glass at the front, the income that stops if the place is unusable. Each one is a decision. None of them is automatic.
That matters more in an office than in almost any other premises, because most of what an office is worth is invisible from the street. There is no stock on the floor and no machinery on a slab. There is a fit-out, a room full of equipment, a team of people and a set of records, and a burst pipe upstairs can take all four out of use in a night.
What does office insurance cover?
Quick answerOffice insurance covers the things an office-based business would have to replace or lose income over: the fit-out and contents inside the space, portable equipment that leaves the building, glass and signage, theft, money on the premises, the income that stops after damage, and your liability if a visitor is injured. Cyber and professional indemnity sit alongside it as their own policies.
Contents and fit-out, which the policy calls Contents and Stock. On the business packs we place, everything you own inside the office is insured as one section under that name, with one sum insured. In a shop most of that figure is stock.
In an office almost none of it is: the professional fit-out first, then the workstations and monitors, the computers, the server or comms cabinet, the photocopiers and the rest of the plant, the chairs, the kitchen, the artwork on the wall, and, if you hold any, stock or merchandise, including anything in a warehouse room out the back.
The sum insured has to be the full replacement cost of all of it, which makes it the wrong place to go small.
Fit-out is the part of that figure worth spelling out, because it is easy to miss. It is everything built into the space rather than sitting in it: partitions and meeting rooms, joinery and reception counters, flooring, ceilings, lighting, data cabling, and any electrical or plumbing work done for your tenancy. If it would take a tradesperson to remove it, it is fit-out, and it belongs in the sum insured at what it would cost to build again today.
The gear that leaves the office. A contents section is written for things at your address. Laptops, phones, cameras and sample kits spend half their life somewhere else. Cover for those is a separate section, called general property on every wording we place, and it has to be selected rather than assumed. Two things are worth knowing before you assume you have it. Anything above a modest value has to be listed individually by name and value rather than sitting inside a general figure.
And at least one of the wordings we place expressly excludes portable tools of trade, mobile phones and laptops from the extension that covers contents temporarily away from the premises, which is precisely the property an office worries about. Others say nothing about them in that extension, which is not the same as covering them. Which of those your own policy does is worth checking rather than assuming. A cap that sits inside a bigger number like this is what the industry calls a sub-limit.
Inside the pack, on every one of those wordings, the section insures accidental loss or damage anywhere in the world rather than only at your address, although two of them also offer a restricted named-perils version of the same section, so it is worth checking which of the two your schedule shows. For most offices we would normally arrange the cover as its own standalone policy alongside the pack instead, because it is the cover most likely to be claimed on. Standalone portable property cover of this kind is generally inexpensive.
Working from home. Most of the wordings we place carry a working-from-home benefit that treats your equipment at an employee's home as if it were at the office. It is capped, commonly at a share of the contents sum insured and on some wordings at a flat dollar figure as well, whichever is the lesser. For a business where half the team works from a spare room two days a week, the size and the shape of that cap are a real question rather than a technicality.
Glass and signage. Entry doors, frontage windows, internal glass partitions and the signage fixed to them. Glass is usually available as a section of the business pack rather than an automatic inclusion, and a single large panel or a glazed meeting room wall can run into thousands of dollars to replace. Most leases require the tenant to carry glass cover.
Theft. Theft is its own separate section on the business pack wordings we place, chosen and paid for on purpose rather than folded into contents cover. What it takes to trigger it is the part that catches people, and an office inside a building with a shared lobby, a lift, cleaners and a dozen other tenants is exactly where that lands.
Where nobody forced their way in, the wordings we place fall back to a separate capped benefit, commonly around $20,000, and only where the theft section was taken in the first place. How that figure behaves varies across the wordings we read in September 2026: some pay the higher of $20,000 and the amount on your schedule, one fixes it at $20,000 flat, and others cap it against your contents sum insured. What business insurance theft cover actually pays for sets out the triggers in full.
Money. Cash on the premises and in transit is its own section too, on every wording we place. Most offices hold very little, so the question is less how much money cover to buy than whether it is worth ticking at all, and that turns on whether anyone in the business handles cash or cheques.
Business interruption. If a fire, a storm or a burst pipe makes the office unusable, this replaces the income you would have earned while you get back on your feet, and the fixed costs that keep running anyway. It only ever responds to physical damage, never to a quiet month. See Business Interruption Insurance for how the indemnity period is chosen.
Public liability. If a client, a courier or a contractor is injured at your office, or their property is damaged because of your business, this is the cover that responds. See Public Liability Insurance.
Management liability and tax audit cover. Any office with staff carries employment-practice and regulator exposure whether or not it has ever had a claim. On the platform we place through, only two of the nine insurers write management liability as a section inside the business pack, so for most businesses it is arranged as its own policy alongside. Tax audit cover, which helps pay for professional representation if the ATO reviews you, most commonly turns up as a small amount included automatically with property or contents cover, and occasionally as a section of a management liability policy. See Management Liability Insurance.
Cyber and professional indemnity, which are not in the pack. An office generally needs cyber cover as well, so it is one of the things we ask about when we go through the sections. The business packs we place do not include cyber as a section, so an office that holds client records, takes card payments or moves money by email is looking at a separate cyber policy rather than a box it can tick inside the pack. See Cyber Insurance. If your office sells advice, design, reports or a professional service, Professional Indemnity Insurance is the cover for the loss your work could cause a client, which no property or liability section reaches.
Not sure which of these applies to you? Try the Insurance Needs Finder, or call and we will work it out on the phone.
The biggest risk: an office sum insured set to the office you used to have
Quick answerThe biggest risk in an office policy is a contents and fit-out figure that made sense three years and one refurbishment ago. Offices grow quietly: another six desks, a partitioned meeting room, a better server cabinet. The sum insured moves only if somebody moves it, and co-insurance is waiting when it has not.
An office does not look like it is getting more expensive. Nothing arrives on a truck and nothing stacks up on a floor. What actually happens is that a lease gets extended and a wall goes in, a team of eight becomes a team of fourteen, the meeting room gets glazed, and the cabling gets redone for a phone system nobody had before. Not one of those events prompts a phone call to an insurer. The figure on the schedule keeps saying what the office was worth the last time anyone asked.
Two things then make the shortfall worse than it looks. The first is that office equipment is worth almost nothing second-hand and a great deal to replace, so a figure that feels generous against what the gear would fetch is short against what it would cost to buy again. The second is co-insurance, which reaches a contents and fit-out claim just as it reaches a building one, and it lands in two different ways.
Where the damage is partial, a fire through one floor say, the insurer can cut what it pays by the same proportion your contents and fit-out figure fell short. Where the office is a write-off, you are paid that figure in full and then discover what fitting out again actually costs. So one outcome pays you less than the damage, and the other pays you every dollar you asked for and still leaves you finding the rest. See The Co-Insurance Clause: What Every Building Owner Must Know for the maths.
If you lease your office, there is a second figure to get right, and it is not really an insurance question until it is: what your lease obliges you to insure, and what you are required to reinstate at the end of the term. Make-good is the one almost nobody realises is coming, and it is usually expensive. That whole argument, landlord policy against tenant policy, sits on For Business Owner Tenants, which is the better page to read next if you rent. Commercial Landlords Insurance sets out the same split from the landlord's side.
If you own the building your office trades from, you have a third figure again: the building itself, insured at what it would cost to rebuild rather than what you paid for it. See Commercial Building Insurance.
How we do it differently
Quick answerAn office is easy to insure badly, because the numbers look small until you add them up. We start with what your lease requires you to insure and what you want the insurance to do, then work through the sections one at a time: the fit-out priced rather than estimated, the gear that travels asked about separately from the gear that lives at people's houses, and the small sections chosen deliberately instead of left to a default pack.
The fit-out gets priced, not estimated. We ask you to walk us through the space and we cost what it would take to build it again as it stands today: partitions, joinery, flooring, lighting, cabling, the lot. Offices routinely carry a sum insured set when the business had six people and a shorter lease, and nobody moved it when the fit-out doubled.
The gear that moves gets its own conversation. Laptops, phones and equipment that leave the building are a different question from the contents sitting at the desk, and so is the equipment that lives at an employee's house two days a week. We ask both, because the wordings treat them as two different things and one of them is capped.
The small sections get chosen, not defaulted. Glass, theft and money are cheap enough that a default pack will happily carry the wrong answer on all three for years. We ask about each of them against how your office actually works, which is the difference between a section that responds and a section that was never ticked.
You see what we are paid. We show our commission and our broker fee in dollars on every invoice, and have done since we started in 2010. The fee is charged in addition to, or in place of, insurer commission, and it pays for the advice and the accountability that comes with it.
Who needs office insurance?
Quick answerAny business that works from an office and owns something inside it, which in practice is mostly professional services: accounting and legal practices, consultants and engineers, medical and allied health rooms, real estate and finance offices, agencies, and the head office of a business whose real work happens somewhere else. What changes the answer is not the profession but whether you lease the space or own it.
If you lease your office, this page covers what goes inside it, and For Business Owner Tenants is the wider starting point for what a tenant insures and what a lease requires.
If you own the building your office trades from, you are covering two things at once: the business inside and the building around it. For Business Owner-Occupiers handles the overlap that generic advice misses.
If you own an office building and lease it to somebody else's business, this page is not really about you. Start at Commercial Landlords Insurance or For Commercial Property Owners.
If your office is a room in your home rather than commercial premises, most home and contents policies limit or exclude business equipment and business related liability, so the business side of it is worth a separate conversation even without a shopfront. Call us and we will tell you whether a policy is worth it at your size.
Some occupations carry a second question that an office policy does not answer, because the risk is in the work rather than the room. Advice, design and reports point at Professional Indemnity Insurance; client data points at Cyber Insurance. The office pack sits underneath both.
Common mistakes
Quick answerOffice mistakes are quiet ones. A sum insured set at the old fit-out, a laptop nobody realised sat outside the contents section, a theft section left unticked in a building with a shared lobby, and a business interruption period that assumed the office would be usable in a month.
Insuring the contents for what they are worth rather than what they would cost to replace. A five-year-old workstation fleet has almost no resale value and a very real replacement cost. The sum insured is the replacement figure for everything on site, not a depreciated book value.
Leaving the fit-out out of the figure. The furniture gets counted and the partitions, joinery, flooring and cabling do not, which is often the larger of the two numbers.
Assuming the laptops are covered because the office contents are. They are two different sections on the wordings we place, and the extension that covers contents away from the premises does not always reach them.
Leaving theft unticked in a building you do not control. A shared lobby, a lift, a cleaning contractor and a dozen other tenants is a lot of legitimate access, and theft is a section you choose rather than one that comes with the contents. What business insurance theft cover actually pays for sets out what has to happen before it pays.
Setting a business interruption period around the repair, not the recovery. An office that is habitable again is not a business that is trading again. Clients moved on, staff were displaced, and records took time to rebuild. The period has to cover getting the work back, not just getting the door open.
Treating renewal as a formality. An office that took on more space, more staff, a bigger fit-out or a second location has changed its risk. If nobody told the insurer, the policy is covering the office you had last year.
Assuming cyber is in there somewhere. It is not in the packs we place, and an office is exactly the sort of business that holds enough client information to make that hurt.
Office Insurance Australia: your questions answered
Is there such a thing as an office insurance policy?
What is the difference between office insurance and business insurance?
Are staff laptops covered when they are working from home or at a client's office?
Do we still need business interruption cover if the team can work from home?
Is cyber cover included in an office business pack?
My office is in a shared or serviced space. What do I still need to insure?
Talk to a broker about your office
Call 07 3292 1111Related cover and reading
Information current as at 20/09/2026
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.
Before your next renewal, check what your office policy actually covers.
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