A slip in your car park. A contractor's injury. A product that went wrong. None of it has to be your fault to become your problem.

Quick answerPublic liability insurance covers your legal liability if someone outside your business, a customer, a passer-by, a contractor visiting your site, is injured or their property is damaged because of your business's negligence. It pays the compensation you're found liable for and the legal costs of defending the claim, including claims that go nowhere. Most policies bundle in product liability, so if something you made, sold or supplied causes the harm, the same policy responds.

It has three edges worth knowing, because each one is 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. An employee hurt at work claims through workers' compensation first, the compulsory, no-fault scheme in every state, and public liability never stands in for it. But the wall between the two is thinner than most owners realise: a seriously injured employee can also sue the business at common law for a lump sum, and where that liability falls outside what the workers' compensation scheme covers, a well-worded public liability policy is built to respond. The detail is in the mistakes section further down this page.

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's professional indemnity territory, a different policy built for a different kind of mistake. See professional indemnity insurance.

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

Most commercial leases specify a minimum public liability limit for tenants, typically $10 million to $20 million, and most landlords, councils and head contracts now expect $20 million as the practical benchmark even where the lease technically allows less. A limit that was adequate when the business started is worth checking against what's actually being asked of you today.

As your broker, our own floor is never below $10 million. At new business and again 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, 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.

A direct insurer sells you a public liability limit off a shelf. You pick a number, they issue a certificate, and whether that number was ever the right one for your lease or your contract is discovered at claim time, which is the worst possible time to discover it.

Here's the honest version of how we do it differently. 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 where you want more than a broker's read of the fine print, we can forward the tender or contract to a no-fee contract review facility for a lawyer's basic advice, at no cost to you. We're not licensed to give legal advice ourselves, so we don't pretend to, we get you to someone who is.

Where the difference shows up on every client, not just the ones with a contract to review, is the market we check your cover against. We can place your public liability across a business pack panel of up to nine insurers competing for the risk, plus one further market where it's genuinely competitive for you, rather than stopping at whichever single insurer happened to write last year's policy.

That's the whole difference. Not a cheaper number. A broker who knows when a contract needs a second set of eyes, and a market wide enough to find the insurer who wants your specific risk.

"My staff are workers' compensation's problem, so public liability never touches them." Mostly true, and dangerously incomplete. Workers' compensation responds first: it is compulsory in every state, it pays an injured employee's medical costs and lost wages regardless of fault, and no other policy replaces it. What happens after that is the part almost nobody has explained to them. A seriously injured employee can sue the employer at common law for a lump sum well beyond statutory benefits, and the scheme that paid the benefits can pursue its own recovery. 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 that common law claim can land on your public liability policy. 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 actually taken out. Second, wordings differ on exactly where this line sits, which makes it precisely 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 was never meant to. Public liability 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, for example. It doesn't pay to redo the pipe itself. Rectifying your own work is treated as a cost of doing business, not an insurable loss, and no policy anywhere is built to change that.

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

"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. If you direct a contractor onto an unsafe site and they're hurt, you can be liable at least in part for that negligence, regardless of whose ABN is on the invoice.

"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 instead of 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. There is a common misread worth naming, because it 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 closer to home, your own liability when a person engaged to work for you is injured, and 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.

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?

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, which means what matters is when the incident happened, not when the claim is eventually made. Close the business, retire, move on, and a public liability claim from work you did years earlier can still be covered by the policy that was in force at the time, no separate run-off cover required. That's a real, structural difference from professional indemnity insurance, which works the other way around.