Kitchen and Bathroom Fitter Insurance

Cover for a sole trader kitchen or bathroom fitter with up to £2m of public liability starts at £86 a year. That is the entry point rather than the average: one person, liability only, with nothing for tools, employees or the job itself. Employ anyone and employers' liability becomes a legal requirement, and from there the price is driven by wageroll and by the work you take on rather than by the trade.

We are a broker, so we take it to several insurers rather than quoting one. Call 02382 000820 for a quote.

A leak in a house is a conversation with your customer. A leak in a flat is a claim from the person underneath, their insurer, and often the block's insurer for the communal areas, and none of them have any relationship with you or any reason to be reasonable about it.

That is why £2m stops making sense the moment you work above other homes. Pressure testing and physically checking every connection before you leave is the control that prevents almost all of it, and it takes ten minutes at the end of a job.

While you are handling it, a worktop is arguably in your care, custody or control rather than being somebody else's property, and public liability wordings commonly exclude exactly that. So the pane you crack carrying it in is not a liability claim.

It has to sit under contract works or goods in transit, and a lot of fitters hold neither. Given that a templated stone top is expensive, unique to that kitchen and weeks away from being replaced, this is worth deciding on purpose. Plenty of fitters choose to carry it themselves with a bigger excess, which is fine as a decision and painful as a surprise.

A wet room stands or falls on the waterproofing under the tiles. If that fails, water goes into the floor structure and the ceiling below, and putting it right means taking the whole room out again. The strip out is yours; the damage to the building is the claim.

On the regulated work, gas needs registration and unvented cylinders need the ticket. Where you sub either out, take a copy of the certificate and check it runs past the end of your job, because if theirs has lapsed the loss lands with you.

Most firms fitting kitchens also fit bedrooms, wardrobes and studies, and it is the same joinery skill on a different wall. For insurance it is the easier half of the business, because the thing that makes kitchens and bathrooms expensive to insure is water and fitted bedrooms have none.

What remains is still worth covering properly. You are in an occupied home, so damage to decoration, flooring and the structure you are fixing into is the common claim, and plasterboard with a badly placed fixing is how a wardrobe comes off a wall. Sliding and mirrored doors are the bedroom equivalent of the worktop problem: heavy, brittle, made to measure, and in your care while you carry them upstairs rather than being third party property.

If bedrooms are a real part of your turnover, say so when you quote. A policy rated purely on kitchen and bathroom work is being priced for a water exposure you are not always carrying, and the split is worth having on the schedule.

Fitting is one risk. Designing and supplying is another, and a surprising number of firms do all three without the policy reflecting it. What people search for as kitchen design insurance and kitchen showroom insurance are really two extra sections on the same policy.

Where you produce the design, the claim that follows a mistake is financial rather than physical: a layout that does not work, an appliance specified that will not fit the aperture, a run of units ordered to the wrong measurement. Nothing is damaged and the customer is out of pocket, which is professional indemnity territory rather than public liability. Where you only fit to somebody else's plan, you do not need it, and that is worth establishing rather than assuming either way.

A showroom adds a third set of exposures again: the premises, the display kitchens in it, which are expensive and are stock rather than fixtures, customers walking around your site, and business interruption if you cannot trade from it. Customer deposits are the one people forget, because a showroom usually holds money against orders that have not been delivered yet.

A leak that reaches two flats below produces a claim large enough to reshape a small fitter's premium for years, and often a letter from an insurer you have never heard of.

The way back is showing that the cause has been removed: pressure testing as standard, checking under units before the doors go on, photographing connections at completion. Those are small, specific and exactly what an underwriter wants to hear.

If a claim like that has followed you to renewal, ring 02382 000820 rather than working through comparison sites, because the systems will simply decline you.

This trade is written by almost every insurer, which makes the quotes look interchangeable and pushes the real differences into the wording. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it, and they work on any broker including us.