Understanding Coverage

If clients pay you for services, advice, or expertise, you should strongly consider Professional Liability, also called errors and omissions (E&O) insurance. It covers claims that your work caused a client financial harm: a missed deadline that cost them a launch, advice that didn't pan out, or an error in a deliverable. General Liability doesn't cover these claims, because no one was hurt and nothing was physically damaged. The loss is purely financial.

These claims can also surface long after a project ends, since allegations of negligence often follow the client's own losses months later. If your income comes from your judgment or your output, this coverage protects the thing you actually sell. The Professional Liability program page covers limits, deductibles, and what a claim looks like.

If your business owns equipment or inventory, or works from a physical space, Business Property insurance protects the assets you depend on to earn. It pays to repair or replace them when covered events (theft, fire, vandalism, accidental damage) take out the gear your business runs on. That matters whether your assets sit in a studio or travel with you between jobs, and it's separate from a personal renters or homeowners policy, which usually excludes business equipment.

Rule of thumb: If losing your gear would cost more than $1,000 to replace, you need this coverage.

The Business Property program page lists covered assets, in-transit options, and replacement-cost coverage.

Every policy has exclusions, and knowing them is how you avoid surprises at claim time. General Liability and Professional Liability don't cover everything that can go wrong in a business. Some risks need their own policy. The big ones to watch: injuries to your own team (that's workers' compensation), vehicles used for work (commercial auto), data breaches and hacks (cyber liability), and anything outside the work you described when you applied.

Intentional wrongdoing and pollution are excluded almost universally. When your business changes, whether that's a new service, a first hire, or a work vehicle, review your coverage so the policy still matches what you actually do.

The simplest way to keep them straight: General Liability covers physical harm to other people and their property, while Professional Liability covers financial harm caused by the work itself. A client tripping over your camera bag is a General Liability claim. That same client alleging your deliverable cost them revenue is a Professional Liability claim.

Most service businesses carry both, because the two policies answer different bad days and neither one fills in for the other. If an incident involves both an injury and a professional mistake, each policy responds to its own part of the claim.

A coverage limit is the most a policy will pay for covered claims. Two numbers matter: the per-occurrence limit, which caps what the policy pays for a single incident, and the aggregate limit, which caps everything the policy pays across the whole policy term. A policy written at $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate can pay up to $1 million on one claim, and up to $2 million across all claims that term.

Clients often set the limits they want to see in their contracts, so check the insurance section of a contract before you sign it. Matching your limits to what your contracts request is usually the practical way to pick them.