How Much Does Commercial Landlord Insurance Cost in Australia?

Written by Daniel Roussounis, Account Director · 26 min read · Reviewed by William Paull, Co-Founder & Account Director

Why is there no single price for commercial landlord insurance?

Quick answerThere is no single price for commercial landlord insurance, and any page that gives you one is guessing. What a commercial landlord pays is three separately priced covers added together on one policy: the building, the rent you would lose while it was repaired, and your own liability as the owner. Each is rated on its own, and the biggest single influence on the building section is not you at all. It is what your tenant does inside the building. Change the tenant and you can change the price without touching a brick.

The short answer

• Commercial landlord insurance is priced as three separate sections on one policy, not as a single product, so there is no one figure to quote.
• The building section is rated largely on what the tenant does inside the building, which means a landlord's price moves when the tenancy changes.
• Loss of rent is priced on two dials you set yourself: the annual rental figure you insure, and the number of months the cover keeps paying.
• In our experience, property owners liability is the section landlords most often leave out or set too low, and it is a small line on the policy schedule relative to what it protects.
• Your lease decides which parts of the building sit on your premium and which sit on your tenant's, so two identical buildings on different leases are correctly priced differently.
• Five real quotes we placed on 12/09/2026 are set out further down, building section only, so you can see how far apart two genuinely similar buildings can sit.
• The only way to know your own number is to get a quote against your actual building, your actual lease and your actual tenant.

Most owners arrive at this question at one of four moments: a renewal has come in higher than last year, you are buying a building that already has a tenant in it, your tenant is changing, or you are working out what a building will cost to hold before you buy it.

You will find plenty of pages that answer this question with a table. A monthly figure for a shop, a monthly figure for a warehouse, a range for an office. Those tables give you an answer. They do not give you a correct one, and a commercial landlord who budgets off one is guessing with someone else's building.

Consolidated Insurance Brokers takes the opposite approach on every cost page we write. Instead of a price we cannot stand behind, this page explains how a commercial landlord's premium is actually put together, which parts of it you control, which parts your tenant controls, and which parts your lease has already decided for you. By the end of it you will be able to look at your own renewal and tell whether the number in front of you is priced against your real risk or against a set of assumptions nobody has checked since settlement.

Where we do put numbers on this page, they are quotes we placed ourselves on real buildings on a real day, with the construction type and the excess named against each one. Five of them are further down. They are there to show you how the pricing behaves, not to tell you what yours will be.

If you want the building-side numbers, our companion guide on what commercial building insurance costs carries the real regional figures and the seven drivers that move a building premium anywhere in Australia. This page is the landlord's version: what changes once there is a tenant, a lease and a rent roll attached to that building.

What are you actually paying for in a commercial landlord premium?

Quick answerThree sections, each with its own sum insured and its own rating. The building section pays to rebuild the structure at today's cost. The loss of rent section replaces the income while that rebuild happens. The property owners liability section defends and pays when someone is hurt in connection with the property. They are priced independently, which is why a landlord's total can move even when the building has not changed.

Most owners think of the premium as one number for one policy, so when it moves they look for one reason. There usually is not one. Here is what sits underneath it.

Three points about that table are worth more than the rest of this page.

The sum insured is a rebuild figure, not a market value and not a purchase price. Market value and purchase price both include the land, and land does not burn down. Setting the building section against either of those numbers puts the premium and the payout on the wrong basis at the same time. The way to get the figure right is a desktop building replacement valuation, and how to build the number yourself is in our building sum insured guide.

Loss of rent has two dials, and both are yours. How much it pays each month, and how many months it keeps paying. Our commercial landlord's insurance guide sets out how to size both, including two real Consolidated Insurance Brokers claims where each dial was tested, and our business interruption page covers what the indemnity period does to the price.

Property owners liability is a small part of the bill and the one we most often find wrong. For a building owner, $20 million is the limit we test as standard and $10 million is the lowest limit we place. In our experience the property owners liability section usually runs somewhere between $450 and $900 a year at a $10 million limit, and between $500 and $1,100 at $20 million, depending on the tenancies and what the tenants do. Doubling the limit therefore costs a few hundred dollars a year, against an exposure that is not measured in hundreds. The full mechanics, including why your tenant's liability policy will not defend you, are on our property owners liability page.

Why your tenant's trade decides your price, and not yours

Quick answerAn insurer prices the building around what happens inside it. As a landlord you do not run that activity, your tenant does, so the biggest single influence on your building premium sits with someone else. A bookkeeper and a commercial kitchen in identical sheds are genuinely different risks, and the same landlord can pay two different prices for the same building across two different tenancies.

This is the fact that separates a landlord's cost question from an owner-occupier's, and almost nothing written about commercial insurance in Australia says it out loud.

An underwriter is not pricing a floor plan. They are pricing the likelihood and the size of a claim, and what drives both is the activity inside the walls. Deep frying, spray painting, welding, hot work, flammable stock, high foot traffic: each of those changes the fire and damage picture, and each of them belongs to your tenant, not to you. Insure a shell with a bookkeeper in it, then re-let it to a takeaway shop, and the correct price for that building has changed even though you have not touched it.

Two consequences follow, and both cost landlords money.

The occupation on your policy has to describe what is actually happening in the building today. If your schedule still says the tenancy is an office and it has been a workshop for two years, you have a policy priced against a risk that is not there. That cuts in both directions. You may be paying for exposure you no longer carry, or, far worse, you may find a claim challenged because what happened does not match what the insurer was told. Telling your insurer when a tenancy changes is not administration, it is the thing that keeps the policy answering.

A change of tenant is a repricing event, and it is better handled before the lease is signed than after. The moment to find out that a proposed tenant's trade shrinks the number of insurers willing to quote your building is while you are still deciding whether to sign them, not at your next renewal. A tenant who looks reliable on paper can be an expensive one to insure, and that cost is yours, not theirs.

There is a related version of this that catches owners of older industrial stock. Expanded polystyrene panel and sandwich panel construction, common in cool rooms and food processing, is one of the biggest red flags on a commercial property risk, and past a threshold most of the insurers on the business pack panel we place through stop quoting. That is a construction issue rather than a tenant issue, but it usually surfaces because of the tenant who wants the cool room. The detail is on what commercial building insurance costs.

What moves a commercial landlord premium, and which way

Quick answerEight things, and they are not equally within your reach. The sum insured, the tenant's trade, the building's construction, its location, the claims history, the vacancy position, the liability limit and the excess. Three of those you set directly, three come with the tenancy, and two are fixed by the building itself. Knowing which is which is what turns a renewal conversation into a negotiation.

Two of those rows deserve a sentence each, because they are the ones landlords most often misread.

Vacancy. An empty building is a different risk from an occupied one, because there is nobody there to notice a leak, deter a break-in or report a small fire early. On the policies we place there is a standard allowance, and on a multi-tenanted building the test is generally whether half or more of the building is empty rather than whether any of it is. The trap is timing, not the clause: the call to the insurer belongs at the point a tenancy is ending, not after the building is already empty. The full vacancy question is answered on our commercial landlords page.

Excess. Lifting the excess lowers the premium, and how far is genuinely unpredictable between insurers, so it is worth testing rather than assuming. The arithmetic test that decides whether the trade is worth taking, and the claims-history check that has to sit beside it, are set out on what public liability insurance costs; the mechanism is the same whatever the policy.

What did five real commercial landlords pay?

Quick answerFive real quotes Consolidated Insurance Brokers placed on 12/09/2026, on five different tenanted commercial buildings, came back between $4,013.49 and $13,884.89 a year. Each of those figures is the building section on its own, with no loss of rent, no glass and no property owners liability on top, and each is the gross amount the owner pays including our broker fee. They are examples of what five particular owners were quoted on one day, never a price list for yours.

These are five real quotes we placed on 12/09/2026 for buildings like these, building section only, no loss of rent, glass or liability. They are indicative, not a quote. The only way to know your number is to get a quote against your actual risk.

Each figure is the most competitive insurer on our panel for that building on that day, not an average and not a market rate. The construction type and the excess are printed beside every one of them because both move the number, and a premium quoted without them cannot be compared with anything.

Now look at B and C, because that pair is the whole argument of this page. Both are $2 million buildings. Both are non-combustible. Both carry a $1,000 excess. B costs more than two and a half times what C costs. Nothing about the two buildings explains the gap. The difference is the tenant's trade: C is leased to two professional offices, and B is leased to a takeaway with a deep fryer. The landlord did not choose that price when they bought the building. They chose it when they signed the lease.

Two things to read carefully before you compare any of this with your own renewal notice. These are quotes on particular buildings on a particular day, not a tariff and not a typical price, and the same building presented a year later, or after a claim, prices differently. And each figure is the building section alone: the loss of rent section and the property owners liability section, both described earlier on this page, sit on top of every one of these numbers on a real landlord's policy.

Your lease is a pricing document

Quick answerInsurance responsibility in a commercial lease follows the lease, not who owns what. Whatever the lease pushes onto your tenant comes off your policy, and whatever it leaves with you goes onto your premium. That is why two identical buildings in the same street, on different leases, can be correctly insured for different amounts at different prices.

Landlords tend to read a lease as a rent document. An underwriter reads it as a schedule of who carries which risk, and so should you before you compare two premiums.

A well-drafted commercial lease typically makes the tenant responsible for their own fitout and their own glass, and often for the day-to-day servicing of building plant such as air conditioning. Capital items commonly stay with the landlord: servicing an air conditioning unit and replacing a failed one are two different obligations, and the gap between them is where landlords get caught. Our commercial landlord's insurance guide works through the fitout question in full, including the case where you provided the fitout but the lease makes the tenant insure it.

For the cost question specifically, three lease terms move the number.

Who insures the fitout. A landlord-provided fitout inside the building is a sum insured on somebody's policy. If it is on yours, it is on your premium.

Who insures the glass. Shopfront glass is, in our experience, a modest and recurring claim, and which side of the lease it sits on can show up in the price. Where a lease increases what the tenant has to carry, glass and air conditioning breakdown being the usual two, that is the mechanism by which it does.

What the lease says about outgoings. If your lease lets you recover outgoings, and an insured event stops the building earning, that recovery can stop with the rent. Whether your loss of rent figure should be rent alone or rent plus recoverable outgoings is a lease question with a direct effect on the sum insured, and therefore on the premium. Our landlord guide covers how to work it out.

None of this is something you have to sort out alone before you ring anyone. We do not insist on seeing your lease, but when a client gives us a copy we read it, and we set the covers to match what it actually says rather than assuming ownership decides.

What multi-tenancy does to the number

Quick answerA building with several tenants is one policy in the owner's name, priced across a mix of activities. The premium reflects the riskiest of them, which is why a building with a bookshop and a commercial kitchen in it is not priced like a building with two bookshops. Recovering that cost fairly through outgoings is a separate problem from insuring it, and it is one we solve by invoicing per tenancy rather than handing you one bill to divide.

Two things happen when a building has more than one tenancy.

The first is underwriting. The policy has to describe every activity in the building, and the price reflects the profile as a whole. A single high-hazard tenancy in an otherwise ordinary building carries the premium, which is worth knowing before you sign it.

The second is recovery. A landlord who can pass insurance costs through outgoings still has to decide what each tenant owes, and a flat split by floor area charges the low-risk tenant for the high-risk one's exposure. Consolidated Insurance Brokers prepares individual per-tenant premium invoices for multi-tenant commercial buildings rather than issuing one bill and leaving the apportionment to you. That is a service we perform, not a legal ruling: your lease still decides what each tenant actually owes, and the policy still belongs in the owner's name.

How a broker actually builds the quote

Quick answerFrom your building, your lease and your tenant, in that order. The building figure comes from a replacement cost assessment rather than a guess, the rent figure comes from the lease including any recoverable outgoings, and the activity description comes from what your tenant genuinely does. Get those three right and every quote you receive is comparable. Get one wrong and you are comparing prices for policies that do not cover the same thing.

Here is the sequence, so you know what you are being asked for and why.

One: the rebuild figure. Not the purchase price, not the market value, not last year's sum insured with the insurer's automatic increase on top. On the commercial buildings that come to us after a renewal shock we usually find the sum insured sitting 30 to 40 per cent below what a rebuild would actually cost, which means the premium those owners were paying was calculated against the wrong number the entire time. Consolidated Insurance Brokers commissions a desktop building replacement valuation, from a registered valuer, at no cost to you and to inform the advice we give you.

Two: the rent figure and the period. From the lease. Rent, plus recoverable outgoings where the lease provides for them, over a period set for a worst case rather than an average one.

Three: the activity. What each tenancy actually does, described accurately, including anything that has changed since the policy was written.

Four: the market. On the Steadfast Client Trading Platform business pack, nine insurers subscribe to the wording, so a properly presented risk can be tested across that panel, up to nine quotes, rather than renewed with one insurer. Two things follow from that. The same building can come back priced very differently by different insurers. On one real Consolidated Insurance Brokers placement, a $1 million warehouse drew nine quotes ranging from $5,000 to $20,000, on the same building, on the same day. That is one case rather than a typical result, and it is not a saving we can promise anyone. What it proves is narrower and more useful: an unshopped premium is an unverified premium, and if you have only ever seen one number you have no idea where in that range you are sitting. And a poor claims history does not just add a loading; it reduces the number of insurers willing to quote at all, and the cheaper markets are usually the first to withdraw, which is how a claims history raises the price twice.

Five: the sum insured against the clause. An accurate sum insured is not only about the payout. On several of the wordings we place, insuring at the full figure in a current professional valuation by an approved valuer takes the underinsurance penalty clause off your policy altogether.

That last point is worth being precise about, because underinsurance behaves in two different ways depending on the loss. On a partial loss, an underinsurance clause scales the payout down in proportion to how far the sum insured sits below what the clause requires, so you receive less than the repair cost. On a total loss the full sum insured is paid, and any gap between that figure and the true rebuild cost is yours to fund. The arithmetic behind the first case is worked through on the co-insurance clause explained, and the wider picture is in our underinsurance guide.

Or call us on 07 3292 1111 and tell us what your tenant does; that is usually enough to start.

What a landlord can genuinely change about the number

Quick answerTwo of the levers on this number belong to a landlord and to nobody else: keeping the insurer current on who is in the building and when it is empty, and using the lease to decide which parts of the building sit on your policy at all. The levers that apply to any commercial building, getting the sum insured right, testing the market and trading excess against premium, are worked through in full on our building and property cost guides rather than repeated here.

Keep the insurer current. New tenant, change of use, refurbishment, a tenancy about to end. Each of those legitimately reprices a building, and each of them being wrong on the schedule means the premium is being calculated against somebody else's risk. This is the lever nobody can pull for you, because you are the only person who knows a tenancy is changing before it changes.

Use the lease allocation deliberately. What the lease hands to your tenant comes off your sums insured, and what it leaves with you goes onto your premium. A lease being negotiated or renewed is the moment to settle who insures the fitout, the glass and the building plant, because that allocation is priced at your next renewal whether or not anyone thought about it.

The other levers are the same for any commercial building. Getting the sum insured right rather than low, testing the market instead of rolling the renewal over, and quoting the excess both ways rather than defaulting it are all set out on what commercial property insurance costs and what commercial building insurance costs.

What is not on any of those lists is buying a thinner policy. A cheaper premium that arrives because a section was removed, a limit was cut or a sum insured was understated is not a saving, it is a deferred cost, and our page on why your commercial insurance went up shows what that looks like when the deferral matures.

FAQ

How much does commercial landlord insurance cost in Australia?

There is no single figure, because a commercial landlord policy is three separately priced covers added together: the building, the rent you would lose while the building could not be used, and your own liability as the owner. This page prints no price band, and that is deliberate. A band that is not tied to a real building, a real lease and a real tenant is not something an owner can budget from. What it prints instead is five real quotes we placed on 12/09/2026, building section only, which came back between $4,013.49 and $13,884.89 a year, and two of those five were $2 million buildings on the same excess that priced more than two and a half times apart. What decides your number is a short list: the sum insured on the building and whether it is a real rebuild figure, what the building is made of, where it stands, what your tenant does inside it, the claims history behind it, and the excess you carry. The only way to know your own number is to get a quote against your actual risk, which for a landlord means your actual building, your actual lease and your actual tenant.

What did real commercial landlords pay in 2026?

On 12/09/2026 we ran quotes on five different tenanted commercial buildings, and the annual premiums came back at $4,456.22 for a $1 million metal industrial shed in Brisbane leased to a light engineering business on a $1,000 excess, $10,730.84 for a $2 million non-combustible strip shop in Brisbane leased to a takeaway with a deep fryer on a $1,000 excess, $4,013.49 for a $2 million non-combustible Brisbane office building leased to two professional tenants on a $1,000 excess, $10,173.55 for a $3 million non-combustible warehouse in Bundaberg leased to a transport business on a $2,000 excess, and $13,884.89 for a $5 million non-combustible Brisbane building holding five shop and office tenancies on a $2,000 excess. Every one of those is the building section only, with no loss of rent, no glass and no property owners liability included, and every one is the gross figure the owner pays including our broker fee, from the most competitive insurer on our panel for that building on the day. The two $2 million buildings sat more than two and a half times apart on the same excess for one reason, the tenant's trade: offices in one, a deep fryer in the other. These are five real quotes we placed on 12/09/2026 for buildings like these, building section only, no loss of rent, glass or liability. They are indicative, not a quote. The only way to know your number is to get a quote against your actual risk.

Does it cost more to insure a building I lease out than one I occupy myself?

Not automatically, and the difference is rarely the leasing itself. On a recent panel run of ours, eight of the nine insurers returned the same price on the same building whether it was presented as a property owner risk or as a business tenant risk. The building section is rated on the same things either way: construction, location, sum insured, claims history and what happens inside. What changes for a landlord is that the activity inside is your tenant's rather than yours, so the price follows a decision you make when you sign a lease rather than one you make about your own business, and that a landlord's policy usually carries a loss of rent section an owner-occupier does not need in the same form. A landlord who leases to a low-hazard professional tenant can pay less than an owner-occupier running a workshop in an identical shed.

Will my premium change when my tenant changes?

It can, and the change should be reported whether it moves the price up or down. Insurers rate the building around the activity inside it, so replacing an office tenant with a food business, a workshop or anything involving hot work genuinely changes the risk and therefore the correct price. The bigger issue is not the money. A schedule that still describes the old tenancy is a policy priced and underwritten against a risk that is no longer there, and that mismatch is what a challenged claim gets pinned on. Tell your broker as soon as a new tenancy is agreed, ideally before it is signed.

How much does loss of rent cover add to the premium?

It is priced on two figures you choose: the annual rental income you insure, including recoverable outgoings where your lease provides for them, and the number of months the cover keeps paying, which is called the indemnity period. Because both are yours to set, this is the section of a landlord's policy where the price is most directly a function of the decision rather than the building. How to size the sum insured and choose the period is covered in the commercial landlord's insurance guide, and what the indemnity period does to the price is on our business interruption page.

If my lease makes the tenant insure the glass and the air conditioning, do I pay less?

It can, and the mechanism is straightforward: what the lease hands to your tenant comes off your sums insured, and your premium is calculated on what remains. Whether it shows up as a visible difference depends on how much the lease actually shifts, so it is worth checking rather than assuming. Two things catch owners out either way. A lease can transfer the obligation to insure something without transferring ownership of it, so confirming the tenant has actually arranged the cover the lease requires is worth doing. And on building plant there is a servicing and replacing distinction: a lease that makes the tenant service the air conditioning often leaves replacing it with you.

I own more than one commercial building. Is one policy cheaper than separate ones?

Sometimes, and not always, so we quote it both ways rather than assuming. It turns on the total sum insured, and it cannot be worked out on paper in advance, so we run the account as one policy and as separate policies and put both results in front of you. Combining locations onto one policy can improve how the risk is presented and gives you one renewal date to manage instead of several, but it also aggregates the total sum insured, which can move the whole account into a different market or past a threshold that was helping you, such as the $5 million line for the federal cyclone reinsurance pool on northern buildings, which is explained on what commercial building insurance costs. Where a portfolio is placed together we keep one account manager across the whole account rather than a different broker for each building.

What does a broker need from me to quote a commercial landlord policy?

The address and construction details of the building, a current rebuild figure or permission to commission a valuation, a description of what each tenancy actually does, your annual rental income and whether outgoings are recoverable under the lease, your claims history for the last five years, and a copy of the lease if you have it. That is the whole list. A quote built from those is comparable against any other; a quote built from a postcode and a guess at the sum insured is not.

If you have most of that in front of you, ring 07 3292 1111 and we will work through it with you on the call.

Related reading

• Commercial Landlords Insurance: the product page, the cover mechanics and the vacancy answers.
• The commercial landlord's insurance guide: the four covers, the fitout trap, the entity-naming trap and two real loss of rent claims.
• What commercial building insurance costs: the seven building drivers and the real regional figures.
• What commercial property insurance costs: the property-side view, and how to lower a premium without cutting cover.
• Property Owners Liability: why your tenant's policy will not defend you, and what limit to test.
• How to calculate your building sum insured: what a genuine rebuild figure includes.
• The co-insurance clause explained: what an inaccurate sum insured costs at claim time.
• Underinsurance in commercial buildings: why a stale sum insured is a cover problem, not a price win.
• Why did my commercial insurance go up: what we find underneath a renewal shock.
• Is commercial property insurance tax deductible?: the deduction question, answered separately.
• Desktop building replacement valuation: the rebuild figure, at no cost to you.
• Insurance terms glossary: sum insured, excess, indemnity period and co-insurance in plain English.