- Home
-
Professions We Cover
-
- Professional Insights
- My Account
- Payments
Protecting professionals and small businesses with tailored professional indemnity insurance
Not on comparison sites — save money by coming direct to us
Get a QuoteOur standard cover is:
Professional indemnity insurance protects your business when a client claims your advice, designs or services caused them financial loss. If you’ve made a mistake, or a client says you have, the policy pays the compensation costs and the legal bills of defending the claim.
It’s the cover that matters most to the professions we insure, because a professional’s product is judgement. Professional Saver has specialised in professional indemnity insurance for more than 40 years, and you can add it to your policy in the same five-minute quote that sorts your public liability. Choose your limit, pay monthly if you prefer, and your documents are online the same day.
Professional indemnity insurance, often shortened to PI insurance (or professional liability insurance in the US), covers compensation claims made by clients for losses that stem from your professional advice or services. It’s the type of business insurance built for people whose work is judgement rather than machinery. Suppose an accountant’s flawed tax advice leads to an HMRC penalty: the client can claim those costs back from the accountant. Professional indemnity cover pays the compensation and the cost of defending the claim, whether or not the mistake is ever proven.
That last part matters. You don’t have to be wrong to be sued; you just have to have a client who believes you were. Defending even a groundless claim takes lawyers, time and money, and the policy carries those costs so your business doesn’t.
Save on your insurance Customers are always telling us how much they saved by switching
Trusted for over 40 years We’ve been providing insurance to businesses since 1984
Financial Strength Insurance provided by a Standard & Poor’s ‘AA- Stable’ rated insurer
Our Professional Saver Insurance (Covea) has been independently rated 5 Stars by Defaqto – the highest possible rating, awarded to excellent products with a comprehensive range of features and benefits.
Our professional indemnity insurance is built around claims that allege:
Alongside the compensation itself, the cover extends to the costs that follow a claim around:
What it won’t cover: injuries and damaged property belong to public liability insurance, and deliberate wrongdoing is never insurable. PI answers for honest professional mistakes, made or alleged.
* Total number of live policies as of 31/10/2025
Anyone paid for their expertise, advice or creative work. In practice, three signals tell you PI should be on your policy:
You provide professional advice or services that clients act on. Management consultants, accountants, financial advisers, engineers and surveyors live here, and so do IT consultants and contractors whose code, systems and recommendations sit inside client businesses.
Your contracts demand it. Many clients, especially larger firms and public-sector bodies, require proof of professional indemnity cover at a minimum level before you start work. No proof, no purchase order.
Your profession regulates it. Professional bodies and regulators often make PI a condition of practising; solicitors, architects, financial advisers and immigration advisers are among the best-known examples. If you’re regulated, check your body’s minimum level of cover before you quote.
If none of those apply but you still sell your judgement, think about how a client would react to a five-figure loss traced back to your work. Sole traders, partnerships and limited companies all benefit from professional indemnity insurance for the same reason: the client’s loss doesn’t care what structure you trade under. That’s the scenario the cover exists for, whichever of the consultancy professions we insure you belong to.
Professional indemnity insurance isn’t a legal requirement for most professions, unlike employers’ liability once you have staff. But “not required by law” understates how compulsory it feels in practice: regulated professions must hold it to practise, and unregulated ones meet it constantly in client contracts. For a working professional, the question is rarely whether to carry PI cover, but how much.
From only£55per year 
From only£55per year From only£55per year From only£55per year From only£55per year From only£55per year Start with whoever is asking. If a professional body regulates you, it sets a minimum. If a client contract demands PI, it names a figure. Beyond that, the honest measure is the size of the losses your advice could cause: a consultant guiding a £2 million project carries more exposure than a tutor marking essays, and the amount of professional indemnity cover should reflect it.
As a reference point, one of our real quote examples includes £250,000 of professional indemnity cover for a two-person careers advisory firm. Your own limit is chosen during the quote, and you can raise it as your contracts grow.
They answer for different kinds of harm. Public liability covers physical accidents: a client injured, property damaged. Professional indemnity covers intellectual ones: advice that cost money, a design that didn’t work, a confidence that leaked. A consultant who trips a visitor in a meeting needs the first; a consultant whose report sank a project needs the second.
With Professional Saver, public liability comes automatically with every policy and professional indemnity is added as an optional cover, so both risks end up inside one policy rather than two sets of paperwork. If a client’s claim is about money you cost them rather than harm you caused, it lands on the PI side.
Tell us as soon as a claim is made against you, or as soon as you become aware of a mistake that could turn into one; early notification keeps your position strong. From there the insurer takes over the defence, appointing the legal support and handling negotiations, and if the claim succeeds it pays the legal and compensation costs up to your limit. Your job through all of it is to keep working, with the cover in place doing what you bought it for.
The cost of professional indemnity insurance follows your risk: your profession, the size of the losses your work could trigger, your turnover, the level of cover you choose, and your claims history. An excess of £250 applies to professional indemnity claims as standard.
If you compare professional indemnity insurance quotes, compare the whole package too. Ours arrives attached to a policy that already includes public liability, products liability, legal expenses and financial loss cover as standard, from £55* a year, so the PI premium is an addition rather than a whole second policy. Run the quote online and the price appears instantly.
Every report you sign, design you deliver and recommendation you make is a small promise that your judgement is sound. Professional indemnity insurance is what stands behind that promise when a client disagrees, backed by an insurer rated AA- (Stable) by Standard & Poor’s, and it helps protect your business without the cost of a second, separate policy. Getting a professional indemnity insurance quote takes about five minutes online: pick the cover you need, add it to your policy, and your documents are ready the same day. Or call us on 0800 121 8748 and talk it through with a person.
Not for most professions, no. The pressure comes from elsewhere: professional bodies that make it a condition of registration, and client contracts that make it a condition of getting paid. Either way the effect is the same, which is why most professionals treat PI as essential rather than optional.
Yes. PI cover follows your professional work, not your premises: advice given from a home office carries exactly the same risk as advice given from a rented one. A client acting on your recommendations neither knows nor cares where you wrote them.
Small projects can produce claims out of all proportion to the fee. A £500 piece of advice that feeds a client’s £50,000 decision carries the larger number’s risk, not the smaller one. If the work involves your professional judgement, the value of the project is a poor guide to the exposure.
Usually, yes. Like other business insurance premiums, HMRC generally treats professional indemnity cover as an allowable business expense, so it can normally be set against your taxable profits. Your accountant can confirm the position for your setup.
Yes, that’s exactly how it’s designed to work. PI is one of our optional covers, sitting alongside the automatic public liability, products liability, legal expenses and financial loss cover in a single adjustable policy. Add it when you quote, or later when a contract first demands it.
