Public liability insurance for trades UK: how much cover, who's cheapest

A mate of mine, plumber, twenty-odd years on the tools, snapped a hidden 15mm feed while chasing out a wall in a first-floor flat. Water came through the ceiling of the flat below and took out a fitted kitchen, a laptop and about half a room of laminate. The bill came to just under £9,000.

He had public liability. It paid. He carried a £250 excess and his renewal went up by about £90 the next year. Without it he'd have been finding nine grand out of a business that turns over sixty.

That's the whole argument for public liability in one paragraph. This guide covers what cover level you actually need, what it costs in 2026, who tends to be cheapest, and the four things on a policy that quietly decide whether a claim gets paid.

What public liability actually covers

Public liability covers you when your work injures somebody who isn't your employee, or damages property that isn't yours. Customer trips over your cable in their hallway and breaks a wrist. Your ladder goes through a conservatory roof. A dropped tool cracks the neighbour's windscreen. Water through a ceiling, like the flat above.

It pays the compensation and it pays the legal costs of defending the claim, which on a contested injury claim can run higher than the compensation itself.

What it does not cover, and this catches people out:

• Putting right your own work. The flood damage is covered. Re-doing the pipe that caused it is not. That's the "defective workmanship" exclusion and it sits in nearly every standard policy.
• Injury to your own employees. That's employers' liability, a separate policy and a legal requirement.
• Your tools and your van. Separate covers again, usually cheap to bolt on.
• Bad advice or a bad specification. If you're sizing systems, doing heat loss calculations, drawing anything or specifying materials, that's professional indemnity territory.

Employers' liability: the one you're legally obliged to have

The Employers' Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 says that if you employ anyone, you need at least £5 million of employers' liability cover, and the certificate has to be available for your employees to see. The Health and Safety Executive enforces it. The fine is up to £2,500 for each day you trade uninsured, plus £1,000 for failing to display or produce the certificate.

The trap for small trade firms is the word "employee". It's wider than a payroll entry:

• An apprentice counts, paid or not.
• A labourer you pay cash on a Saturday, where you tell him what to do and provide the tools, usually counts.
• A genuinely self-employed subbie with his own insurance, his own tools and control over how he works usually does not.

That middle case is where most firms get it wrong. If you direct the work and supply the kit, HSE will treat the person as your employee whatever the invoice says. When in doubt, get the cover. Adding a labourer to an existing policy is a few hundred pounds a year. Getting it wrong is £2,500 a day.

The HSE guidance note is short and worth ten minutes of your evening.

How much cover do you need?

Cover level is driven by who you work for, not by how careful you are.

£1 million

The floor. Fine if you only do small domestic work, no work at height, no commercial premises. Cheapest tier, but it rules you out of a lot of work the moment anyone asks for paperwork.

£2 million

The sensible default for most 2 to 6 lad firms. It's what most trade bodies, letting agents and estate agents ask for, and the step up from £1m usually costs very little because the chance of a claim reaching that size is small. Ask for both prices and you'll often find £2m is ten or fifteen pounds a year more.

£5 million

The standard demand for local authority work, housing associations, schools, the NHS, and most main contractors' supply chains. If you want any public-sector or subcontract work at all, this is the number on the form. Gas Safe, NICEIC and NAPIT schemes and most approved-installer lists sit here too.

£10 million

Larger commercial contracts, rail, some airport and utilities work. You'll know because the contract will tell you. Don't buy it speculatively.

What it costs in 2026: a worked example

Take Adam Wójcik trading as Wójcik Plumbing. Sole trader, one apprentice, £78,000 turnover, domestic and small commercial work, occasional ladder work at first-floor height, no roof work, no hot works beyond soldering. Based in the Midlands, no claims in five years.

A realistic annual insurance bill for that firm in 2026:

£606 a year is £50.50 a month, or about £11.65 a week. On £78,000 of turnover that's 0.78%. Put it another way: on a £4,000 bathroom, the insurance cost of that job is roughly £31.

Every one of those lines is an allowable business expense, so at the basic rate of income tax plus Class 4 National Insurance the real cost after tax relief is nearer £430. Price it into your day rate and forget about it.

Bump the same firm up to £5m public liability and the PL line goes from about £186 to about £230. Add roof work and it can double again, because working at height is the single biggest factor most insurers price on after claims history.

Who's cheapest, honestly

Nobody can name one insurer as cheapest for every trade, and anyone who does is selling something. Premiums are rated on trade, postcode, turnover, claims record, working height, hot works, and whether you touch listed buildings or flats. Two electricians in the same town with the same turnover can get quotes forty per cent apart on claims history alone.

What works is a 45-minute session, once a year, three weeks before renewal:

1. Get quotes from three trade-specialist brokers. The names that come up repeatedly for UK trades are Simply Business, Tradesman Saver, Hiscox, AXA, Rhino Trade Insurance, Protectivity and Trade Direct. Specialists usually beat generalists on trade risks because they understand what a first fix is.
2. Run one comparison site as a sense-check, not as the decision. Comparison quotes assume a clean, standard risk. If yours isn't standard, the quote will change once you declare properly.
3. Check your trade body. FMB, NICEIC, NAPIT, SNIPEF, the Guild of Master Craftsmen and CIPHE all have member insurance arrangements. Sometimes they're the cheapest, sometimes they're not, but they're usually written to match what the scheme demands.
4. Phone your current insurer last, with the three quotes in front of you. Renewal pricing is soft on trade policies and a straight "I've got £186 elsewhere for the same cover" moves the number more often than not.

Keep the quotes in a folder with the date on them. Next August you'll do the same 45 minutes with a running comparison, and you'll spot when your insurer has quietly walked the premium up 12% a year for three years.

The four lines that decide whether a claim gets paid

Price is the last thing to look at. These four come first, because they're where cheap policies get cheap.

1. The working height limit

Most standard trade policies cap you at working from ladders or towers up to a set height, often 3 metres or 10 metres depending on the insurer. Go above it and the claim can be refused. If you ever go on a two-storey roof, on scaffold or in a cherry picker, that limit needs raising before the job, not after the fall.

2. The hot works condition

Blowtorch, grinder, hot air gun, anything with a flame or a spark. Nearly every policy carries a hot works clause requiring a fire watch for a set period after you finish, commonly 60 minutes, plus an extinguisher on site and the area cleared of combustibles. Fire claims are the ones that run into hundreds of thousands, and this is the condition insurers check first. If you solder, know the clause.

3. The excess

Standard is usually £250 to £500 for property damage. Some cheap policies run £1,000 or more, or apply a separate, higher excess for water damage specifically. On the plumbing job at the top of this piece the difference between a £250 excess and a £1,000 excess was £750 in one afternoon.

4. Claims made against claims occurring

Public liability is normally written on a claims-occurring basis, which means the policy in force when the damage happened is the one that responds, even if you've moved insurer since. Professional indemnity is usually claims-made, which means you need cover in force when the claim is brought. If you carry professional indemnity and then stop trading, you need run-off cover for six years. Worth knowing before you retire.

What NOT to do

1. Don't under-declare your turnover to shave the premium. Insurers rate on turnover and they check it at claim time. Declaring £40,000 when you turn over £90,000 gives them a clean route to reduce or refuse the payout, which is precisely the moment you need it. Same goes for declaring "domestic only" while doing commercial work.
2. Don't assume your subbies are covered by your policy. A genuinely self-employed subbie needs his own public liability. Ask for the certificate, check the expiry date, and keep a copy on file with the job. If he causes the damage and he's uninsured, the customer comes to you.
3. Don't let it lapse between jobs. A quiet January is when people cancel to save £15 a month. Claims-occurring cover responds to the date of the damage, and a gap in cover is a gap forever, not just for that month.
4. Don't buy on the headline price alone. The cheapest quote with a 3-metre height limit is worthless to a firm that fits fascias. Read the height limit, the hot works condition and the excess before you read the premium.
5. Don't file the certificate in the van. Main contractors, letting agents and councils will ask for it at the least convenient moment. Keep a PDF on your phone and attach it to the job record, so it goes out with the quote instead of holding the job up for two days.

Getting the certificate in front of customers

There's a small commercial angle here that most trades miss. The certificate isn't just compliance paperwork, it's a trust signal on a domestic quote.

A homeowner choosing between three quotes for a £6,000 job is nervous about exactly one thing: what happens if this goes wrong in my house. A quote with a line saying "£2m public liability, certificate attached" answers that question before they ask it. The other two quotes don't.

Attach the PDF to every quote over a couple of grand. It costs nothing and it wins work against firms who've got the same cover and never mention it. If your quotes go out from your phone, keep the certificate saved alongside your quote template so it goes with every job automatically instead of being something you remember to do half the time.

The short version

Carry £2m public liability as standard and £5m if there's any chance of council or main-contractor work. Get employers' liability the day you take on an apprentice or a regular labourer, no exceptions. Budget somewhere around £150 to £600 a year all in for a small firm, price it into your rates, and claim it against tax.

Then spend 45 minutes each August getting three fresh quotes. That's the whole job. It's cheaper than one afternoon with water coming through somebody's kitchen ceiling.