Public liability insurance

Three edges are each a different product on this site, not a gap in this one.

Your own staff are mostly, but not entirely, a different scheme's job. Workers' compensation responds first and public liability never stands in for it, but a seriously injured employee's own claim can still reach this policy where your state's scheme does not answer it. The mistakes section below has the mechanism.

Advice and service failures sit outside it too. If a client loses money because of advice you gave or work you were engaged to deliver, that is professional indemnity territory. It is a different policy, built for a different kind of mistake.

If you are the landlord rather than the business trading from the premises, your exposure as building owner runs on a separate, cheaper policy again. See property owners liability and insurance for commercial property owners.

Most commercial leases set a minimum public liability limit for tenants, typically $10 million to $20 million. Most landlords, councils and head contracts now expect $20 million as the practical benchmark, even where the lease technically allows less. A limit that suited the business at the start is worth checking against what is being asked of you today.

As your broker, our own floor is never below $10 million. At new business and at every renewal, we test whether an insurer on our panel will give you $20 million for the same premium you'd pay for $10 million. We do it because the point of good broking is the most cover for the least premium, not the other way round. In our experience very few brokers run this two-minute check; we run it as standard.

Most commercial leases and a lot of trade contracts do more than require you to hold public liability insurance. They make you personally promise to cover the other party for anything connected to your presence on site, sometimes even for things that weren't your fault. That promise is an indemnity clause. Most policies exclude liability you've taken on purely by signing a contract. Everything else you promised is a promise your policy never picked up.

Fault doesn't have to start with you for you to end up in the claim. Someone injured at your premises sues the business they were dealing with, which is you. Whether the underlying problem was built in by a landlord, a previous owner or a contractor gets sorted out later, between lawyers, at your expense in the meantime. Public liability responds to who the injured person deals with, not to who's ultimately to blame. That is why "it wasn't really my fault" is no reason to skip checking your cover.

A direct insurer sells you a limit off a shelf. You pick a number, they issue a certificate, and whether that number was ever right for your lease or your contract is discovered at claim time.

We don't demand your lease before every quote, and most customers wouldn't hand it over unprompted if we did. What we do is know when to ask. If you're chasing a tender or a head contract with insurance conditions attached, we ask to see it, and we can send it to the no-fee contract review facility named above. We're not licensed to give legal advice ourselves, so we don't pretend to, we get you to someone who is.

If you own the building rather than trade from it, your exposure is a different, separate product. See property owners liability.

"My staff are workers' compensation's problem, so public liability never touches them." Mostly true, and dangerously incomplete. Workers' compensation responds first: compulsory in every state, paying an injured employee's medical costs and lost wages regardless of fault, and no other policy replaces it. At the serious end a badly hurt employee can sometimes sue the employer for a lump sum on top of the scheme's benefits. Whether they can, and what they can claim, is set by each state's own law: the scheme is WorkCover in Queensland, and every other state runs its own. The standard business pack wording excludes injury to your workers only to the extent the workers' compensation scheme covers it, and expressly hands cover back where it doesn't. So where your state's scheme does not answer that claim, this policy can be what does.

Two traps sit inside this. First, the write-back assumes you complied with the workers' compensation law. Public liability never substitutes for a compulsory workers' compensation policy you failed to hold, because the exclusion applies whether or not that policy was taken out. Second, wordings differ on exactly where this line sits, which makes it the kind of clause worth having read before a claim rather than after one.

"If my work is faulty, my public liability pays to fix it." It doesn't, and it never was meant to. The policy pays for the injury or property damage your faulty work causes to someone else: a burst pipe you installed whose escaped water damages a client's floor. It doesn't pay to redo the pipe. Rectifying your own work is a cost of doing business, not an insurable loss.

"The contractor on my site has their own public liability, so I'm covered." Their policy protects their business from claims against them, and does nothing for a claim made against you. If that contractor doesn't hold current cover, or their policy has lapsed, or their work was subcontracted down the chain uninsured, the claim can still land on your desk. It lands on you as the business that engaged them. The two-minute habit that closes this one is sighting a current certificate of currency before work starts, rather than taking someone's word for it. That is the one-page document an insurer issues confirming a policy is active and what it covers.

"I'm not liable if my subcontractor is hurt, they're self-employed." At law, a self-employed subcontractor working on your job is still owed a duty of care. Direct a contractor onto an unsafe site and they're hurt, and you can be liable at least in part for that negligence. Whose ABN is on the invoice does not change it.

"Subcontractor payments are just a pricing question, so a rough figure will do." It is the declaration most often answered from memory, and it decides more than your premium. The main reason an insurer asks what you pay subcontractors is to rate exactly the exposure above. A business that engages contractors rather than employing people pays no workers' compensation for them. So the risk of one of them being hurt on the job transfers across to this policy, where it arrives as a personal injury claim.

Those claims are expensive, which is why insurers price for them. The common misread sends owners looking at the wrong thing: the question is not about covering the subcontractor's work, the damage they might do to someone else's property. What the declaration commonly governs is your own liability when a person engaged to work for you is injured. On many wordings it is what switches that cover on.

Direct insurer wordings commonly exclude personal injury to subcontractors by endorsement, while the Steadfast badged wordings we place generally cover it, particularly where those payments have been disclosed. Declare the real figure, and if you take on a subbie mid-year, say so then rather than at renewal.

What excess applies if a sub-contractor is injured on my site?

Often a much higher one than you expect. Many liability policies carry a standard excess for most claims, but a separate, larger excess for personal injury to anyone engaged to work on your site. In a recent matter, CIB flagged a $10,000 sub-contractor injury excess to a Brisbane residential building company before the insurer confirmed it, so there were no surprises. The full story is in If a subcontractor is hurt on your job, can you be held liable?

Is a contractor hurt at your premises your public liability problem?

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.

Often it is yours, through your public liability policy, and frequently in a way business owners do not expect.

A contractor had provided services at a Queensland engineering business for about two years. They slipped on a spill in its yard. By their own account they had no injury cover of their own, so the only cover within reach was the business's public liability policy.

Because we lodged the claim properly the moment a legal demand arrived, the public liability insurer granted indemnity, appointed specialist lawyers, and is running the defence, investigating the spill, the contractor relationship and the medical link, at the insurer's cost rather than the client's.

Here is why it matters. Every business with contractors, cleaners or delivery people on site has this exposure. Whether you engage people as contractors or employees, and whether your public liability cover is sized and structured for injuries to people working on your premises, is a conversation to have before someone slips, not after a legal demand arrives. The claim is still being handled; the point is how the right cover, lodged promptly, put the insurer's defence to work.

One genuine piece of good news sits underneath all of this. Public liability is generally an occurrence-based policy, so what matters is when the incident happened, not when the claim is eventually made. Close the business, retire or move on, and a claim from work you did years earlier can still be covered by the policy in force at the time. On most wordings no separate run-off cover is required. That's a real, structural difference from professional indemnity insurance, which works the other way around.

Two clauses, because they differ far more than a certificate shows.

The first is other people's property in your care: a customer's machine on your bench, or a client's stock around you while you work. It is generally excluded, then handed back in part. Across the 17 general liability wordings we compared, that hand-back runs from $100,000 to $500,000 a claim as printed, before your schedule changes it. Some have no general hand-back, one gives it only where you accepted liability for the property, and many exclude the part you are working on. Damage above the figure is yours to fund, so we check it against what you actually hold.

The second is paid advice. If a fix you recommended on a paid job leads to injury or damage, a few of those wordings hand that back, most hand back only free advice, and a few exclude advice whether you charged or not. If advice is part of your work, talk to a broker before it matters.