Why You Cannot Buy General Liability Insurance Online
Can you buy general liability insurance online?
Quick answerNo. There is a whole liability insurance market operating in Australia that you cannot reach from a search bar: insurers and specialist underwriting agencies that price liability risks one business at a time, by hand, for the businesses a packaged policy cannot price. Nothing in it is built to sell to the public, because everything in it is built to deal with licensed brokers instead. In the trade this cover is called general liability insurance.
First, the distinction that trips most people up. The liability cover you can buy online is usually the public liability section inside a packaged business policy. A standalone general liability policy is a different product. It is priced by a person rather than a table, and it is placed through a broker. Seeing public liability for sale online is not evidence that general liability is for sale online.
You have probably already had the experience that brought you here. You typed what you do and the word insurance into a search bar, and you got a wall of packaged small business policies, each quotable in about four minutes, each asking you the same eight questions. If your business fits what those policies were built for, that is usually the right outcome, and the rest of this page is not about you.
This page is about what happens when your business does not fit. Because there is a second market behind the first one, it is large, and it is invisible from where you are standing. Below is what it is, how a policy in it actually gets priced, which businesses end up there, and how you would know if yours is one of them.
How big is the market you cannot see?
Quick answerBigger than almost any business owner would guess. Well over 100 specialist underwriting agencies operate in Australia, and the industry body representing them says its members alone write more than $10.5 billion of premium a year, across every class they cover. Lloyd's of London, which stands behind a large share of them, grew its network of authorised Australian agencies from 90 to more than 160 over roughly the decade to 2023. None of it advertises to you.
Start with the agencies. An underwriting agency is a specialist firm that holds a written authority from an insurer, or from a syndicate, meaning one of the underwriting groups that operate inside the Lloyd's market in London, to price and issue policies on that insurer's behalf in a class the insurer wants to write. The agency does the underwriting; the money behind your policy is the insurer's. Australia's peak body for these firms says it represents more than 130 of them, describes that as the vast majority of the agencies operating here, and puts their combined annual premium above $10.5 billion.
Be careful how you read that number, because we are being careful too. That $10.5 billion covers everything those agencies write, which includes property, marine, cyber and professional risks, not liability alone. No public figure isolates the liability slice, and we are not going to invent one. What the number does tell you, reliably, is the scale of an entire distribution channel that has no consumer-facing front door.
Then there is Lloyd's of London, which is not a single insurer but a market that other insurers underwrite inside, and which has been licensed to write insurance in Australia for decades. On its own account it is the fourth-largest insurance market in this country, and liability business is the largest single category it writes here. Most of that business reaches Lloyd's through local firms it has authorised to bind cover on a syndicate's behalf. The most recent public count of those firms, reported in early 2024, put the number at more than 160, up from 90 around a decade earlier.
One more figure, and the same caution applies to it. In the 2025 financial year, $35.6 billion of the $77.9 billion Australians spent on general insurance was placed through brokers rather than bought directly, which is a little under half. That figure covers all general insurance, home and car included, so it is not a measure of this market. It is a measure of the shape of the industry, and the shape is the point: a very large part of Australian insurance was never designed to be bought off a screen.
Why is none of it for sale to the public?
Quick answerBecause these firms were built to serve brokers, not consumers, and building a retail arm would undo the reason they exist. An underwriting agency exists to apply specialist judgement to risks a large insurer does not want to staff in-house. Selling to the public would mean a call centre, an advertising budget and an automated rating engine for exactly the risks that cannot be rated by machine. So the front door was never built.
Insurers use these agencies for three consistent reasons, and each one explains a bit more of why you cannot get in. The first is expertise. A specialist liability underwriter who has spent years pricing one difficult class knows things a general insurer would have to hire a team to learn. The second is reach. An agency lets an insurer's money into a class, a region or an industry without that insurer opening an office or building a sales force. The third is flexibility. An insurer can point money at a class for as long as it wants to be in that class, without a permanent department to wind down later.
Read those three back and the consequence is plain. Every one of them is a reason to work through brokers. None of them is a reason to build a consumer website. A broker arrives with the risk already gathered, the questions already answered and a professional obligation of their own for the accuracy of what they present. A member of the public arrives with none of that, and there is nobody on the other side whose job it is to walk them through it.
It is worth being precise about what is and is not happening here, because it would be easy to hear a conspiracy in it. Nobody is keeping you out. There is no secret price list you are being denied. It is a distribution decision, made for ordinary commercial reasons, and its side effect is that an entire market is invisible to the people it exists to protect.
The clearest evidence of the split sits inside the agencies themselves. One large specialist agency publishes exactly this arrangement: an automated rating tool that quotes more than 400 straightforward occupations, and, alongside it, a separate senior liability team that underwrites the harder risks by hand. The machine handles what a machine can handle. Everything else goes to a person. The businesses that end up in front of that person are the subject of the rest of this page.
How does a general liability policy actually get quoted?
Quick answerBy a person reading a written case about your business, not by a computer scoring a form. Your broker prepares what the market still calls a quote slip: who you legally are, what you physically do all day, how big you are, and what has gone wrong before. That goes to a liability underwriter, at an insurer or at a specialist agency writing on that insurer's or Lloyd's money, who reads it and prices your business individually.
What goes into a submission is worth knowing, because it explains why this cannot be a form you fill in yourself. A liability underwriter is looking for your exact legal entity names, which is not a formality when a claim later has to attach to one of them. What you actually do, described properly rather than reduced to a trade label. Your background and experience in that work. Your turnover, both the figure you estimated last year and the figure you actually did. And your claims history in full, including what each one settled for, not just how many there were.
Look at that list again and notice what it is not. It is not eight multiple-choice questions. Most of it is prose, and prose is the point. A rating engine can only ask questions it already has a box for, so anything about your business that does not fit an existing box simply cannot be told to it. A written submission has no such limit. The thing that makes your operation safer than its trade code suggests, the reason last year's claim will not repeat, the certification nobody thought to ask about: all of it can be put in front of the person deciding, and all of it can move the answer.
That cuts both ways, honestly. A submission that is thin, or vague about the difficult parts, gets read as exactly that. Underwriters in this market read submissions all day, and they know what a careful one looks like. This is the part of broking that never shows up in a price comparison, and it is most of the value: assembling the case, putting it to the right underwriter, and answering the questions that come back.
Two practical consequences for you. It takes longer than four minutes, usually days rather than seconds, because a human being is reading it. And it is not a rate you can look up, because it did not come from a table. It came from a judgement about your business, which is the reason the same business can be priced very differently by two underwriters looking at the same slip.
Which businesses does the packaged market have no box for?
Quick answerThe packaged market is enormous, and it is still finite. Insurers write packaged business policies across thousands of occupations, one of the biggest lists more than 5,000, and every one of those policies also carries acceptance criteria, so an occupation outside them is not something you can negotiate at the form. Where that list ends, the specialist market begins. Two documented examples: demolition, site preparation and asbestos work, and abattoirs, poultry processing and cold storage.
First, credit where it is due. The packaged business policy is a genuinely good product and it covers the overwhelming majority of Australian small businesses properly. One major insurer's own small business page says it covers thousands of occupations, and another publishes a figure above 5,000. If your business is on those lists and behaves the way those lists expect, you are well served, and there is no reason to go looking for a harder way to buy insurance.
But read the first of those pages a line further and you find the sentence that matters: acceptance criteria apply to each cover, based on the characteristics of your business. That is the boundary, stated plainly by the people who drew it. A packaged policy is a large defined set, not everything, and a business outside the set does not get a worse price at the form. It gets no price at all.
Here is one class that sits outside it, and the evidence is about as neutral as evidence gets. The peak body for Australia's underwriting agencies, an industry association rather than anyone with something to sell you, runs a page on environmental liability that names demolition, site preparation and asbestos work as target risks for that specialist cover. Meanwhile a specialist liability agency states in its own words that its specialties include asbestos and demolition risks. Both facts point the same way: the packaged market largely does not do this work, and a separate market was built to.
A second class, same pattern. Abattoirs, poultry processing and cold storage are listed as specialist areas by agencies in that same industry directory, one of which names complex property and general liability in abattoirs as a core part of what it writes. If your first reaction is that these are unusual businesses, that is exactly the reaction the invisibility of this market produces. These operations run in every state, they are part of how the country feeds itself, and every one of them is insured. None of them bought it online.
It is not only unusual occupations, either. Size does it too. A business can be entirely ordinary in what it does and still outgrow what a packaged policy was designed to carry, at which point the same conversation starts for a completely different reason.
One honest limit on all of this. Insurers keep the occupations they will not write inside their own underwriting guides, which are not published to the public, so nobody can hand you a list with your trade on it, and we are not going to invent one. The evidence above runs the other way round, and it is stronger for it: it is not us guessing who gets declined, it is a neutral industry body and the specialist market itself telling you which classes they exist to cover.
When does this market matter to you?
Quick answerThree signals, and most readers have none. Your work is the kind the packaged market treats as higher risk. Your turnover has outgrown what a packaged policy was built to carry. Or your liability premium has sat at the top of the packaged range for two or three years. If none applies, your business pack is almost certainly the right home for your liability cover, because minimum premiums in this market generally start well above a business pack's liability section.
That last sentence is the one to hold onto, because it is the part nobody selling you anything would volunteer. This market is not better. It is different, and it is built for a particular kind of risk. Moving a business into it that does not belong there buys a bigger bill and nothing else.
Your occupation. If your work involves the things that make liability underwriters pay attention, height, heat, other people's occupied premises, the public in numbers, heavy plant, or an industry with a difficult claims record, you may already be at the edge of what a packaged policy will price sensibly. You would usually know, because the quotes come back awkward, or slowly, or not at all.
Your size. A packaged policy is built around a size of business as much as a type. Grow past it and the package starts straining: the liability section gets priced hard, or the whole thing needs restructuring around a business that has stopped resembling the one the product was designed for.
Your renewal history. This is the most common signal and the easiest to miss, because it arrives slowly. A liability premium that has risen materially three years running, without a claim or a change in what you do, is usually a sign that your cover is being priced by a table that no longer has a good box for you. What that costs you, and what the alternative actually involves, is set out properly in How much does public liability insurance cost?, which covers the seven things that decide the number and what happens at the top of the range.
If any of that sounds like your business, the useful question to put to your broker is short: has my liability been to the standalone market, and what came back? A good answer names who was approached and what they said. There is no promise buried in that question, and you should be wary of anyone who offers one, because the honest outcome is sometimes that the packaged policy was already the right answer. But it is a question that gets asked properly or not at all, and it can only be asked by someone with a way in.
For what a standalone liability policy actually covers, how limits work and how we place it, see General Liability Insurance. For the broader question of what a broker reaches that you cannot, Direct Insurer vs Broker covers it across every class, not just this one.
Find out whether this market is open to your business
Most businesses never need to know any of this, and that is a good outcome. But if your liability cover has been getting harder or more expensive every year, it is worth finding out whether it has ever been to the market that prices this properly. Tell us what your business does, and we will tell you straight whether the packaged policy is still the right home for it.
Find out where your liability should sit
Or call us on 07 3292 1111 and tell us what your business does. For new enquiries we reply within 90 minutes during business hours, 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday.
FAQ
What is general liability insurance in Australia?
It is public and products liability cover bought as a policy in its own right, rather than as one section inside a packaged business insurance policy. The cover answers the same question, harm your business causes to other people or their property, but it is priced individually by a liability underwriter instead of by a rating table, which is why it is used for businesses a packaged policy cannot price properly. What it covers is set out on our General Liability Insurance page.
Why can I not buy general liability insurance online?
Because nothing in that market was built to sell to the public. The insurers and specialist underwriting agencies that write this cover deal with licensed brokers, so they have no online quote form, no call centre and no consumer shopfront. It is a distribution decision rather than a restriction, and the effect is that a large market is invisible to the businesses it exists to serve.
What is a quote slip?
It is your broker's written presentation of your business to an insurance underwriter: your exact legal names, what you actually do, your turnover, and your full claims history. The underwriter reads it and prices your business individually. The name comes from Lloyd's of London, where underwriters signed their names underneath the risk on the slip to commit to it, and it is still the word the Australian market uses.
What is an underwriting agency, and is it an insurer?
No. An underwriting agency is a specialist firm holding a written authority from an insurer, or from a syndicate at Lloyd's, to price and issue policies on that insurer's behalf. The agency does the underwriting and issues the paperwork; the money behind the policy is the insurer's. Australia's peak body for these firms represents more than 130 of them.
Do I need a broker to get a general liability quote?
In practice, yes. These policies are quoted broker to insurer, one business at a time, and the underwriters who price them do not take enquiries from the public. A broker also does the part that decides the answer: assembling the submission, choosing which underwriters to put it in front of, and dealing with what comes back.
How do I know if my business needs standalone general liability cover?
Three signals. Your work is treated as higher risk, your turnover has outgrown what a packaged policy was built to carry, or your liability premium has climbed at the top of the packaged range for two or three years running. If none of those applies, your business pack is very likely the right place for your liability cover, because minimum premiums in this market generally start well above a business pack's liability section.
Is a policy from an underwriting agency as safe as one from a major insurer?
The agency is not the one carrying the risk. It underwrites and issues the policy under a written authority, but the claim is paid by the insurer or the Lloyd's syndicate whose money stands behind it, and that insurer is named in your policy documents. Lloyd's itself has been licensed to write insurance in Australia for decades. If you want to know exactly whose money is behind a quote, ask your broker and it should be answered plainly.
Related reading
- General liability insurance: what a standalone liability policy covers, how the limits work, and how we place it.
- How much does public liability insurance cost?: the seven things that decide your premium, and what happens when it reaches the top of the range.
- Public liability insurance: what the cover does, who needs it, and the mistakes that cost businesses money at claim time.
- Direct insurer vs broker: what the direct and comparison channels genuinely cannot do for you, across every class.
- Why use an insurance broker: the whole case, in one place.