The one that is a legal requirement
Employers' liability insurance is compulsory from the day you employ anyone, and the minimum cover required by law is £5 million. Most policies are written at £10 million as standard because insurers price the difference at very little.
The penalty for not holding it is a daily fine for every day you are uninsured, and it is enforced by the Health and Safety Executive rather than by an insurer noticing. You must also be able to produce the certificate when asked.
The trap in cleaning is that it applies more widely than "employees" suggests. If you engage cleaners you control (you set the rota, provide the equipment and expect that specific person) you very likely need it even if everyone involved calls the arrangement self-employed. Our guide on employment status covers why that label does not settle it.
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The two that decide whether you can bid
Neither of these is legally compulsory, and both are commercially compulsory. A tender document will ask for certificates before it asks for your price.
- Public liability. Covers injury to a third party or damage to their property. £1 million is the usual floor, £2 million is common, and £5 million is routinely specified by commercial clients, NHS trusts, schools and local authorities. Check the level your target clients ask for before you buy, because increasing cover mid-tender is slower than it sounds.
- Treatment risk, sometimes called damage to property worked upon. This is the one that catches cleaners, and it is the single most important paragraph on this page. Standard public liability often excludes damage to the very thing you were working on. Scratch a client's floor while cleaning it, mark a worktop with the wrong chemical, or ruin a carpet, and a policy without treatment risk cover may decline the claim, because the damage was to the item you were paid to clean.
Ask your broker the treatment risk question explicitly and get the answer in writing. It is not always included, it is not always called the same thing, and it is exactly the claim a cleaning business is most likely to make.
The rest, by what you actually do
| Cover | Who needs it | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Employers' liability | Anyone with staff | Legally required. £5m minimum, £10m typical |
| Public liability | Everyone | Injury or damage to third parties and their property |
| Treatment risk | Everyone | Damage to the item you were cleaning. Often excluded as standard |
| Loss of keys | Anyone holding client keys | Lock replacement, which on a commercial site can run to thousands |
| Contents and equipment | Anyone with machines | Scrubber-driers, vacuums and stock, in the van and in store |
| Business vehicle | Anyone driving to jobs | Social and commuting cover does not cover business use |
| Professional indemnity | Consultancy or specification work | Advice given, rather than work done |
| Personal accident | Owner-operators | Income if you cannot work. Nobody else covers a sole trader |
| Cyber | Anyone holding client data | Increasingly asked for in larger tenders |
Loss of keys deserves more attention than it usually gets. A cleaning business commonly holds keys, fobs and alarm codes for dozens of properties, and a lost master key to a commercial building can mean re-keying an entire site. That claim is far larger than most operators expect and is not always included.
The gaps that catch cleaning businesses out
- Business use on the car policy. Social, domestic and pleasure plus commuting does not cover driving between clients. This is the most common uninsured exposure in the trade and it invalidates the whole policy in an accident.
- Equipment left in a van overnight. Many policies exclude it, or require a locked and alarmed vehicle. Read the clause before you leave a scrubber-drier in a van on a driveway.
- Working at height. Anything above ground level, including internal window cleaning from steps, is commonly restricted to a stated height. Exceeding it can void a claim.
- Specialist work. Jet washing, carpet and upholstery cleaning, biohazard and trauma cleaning and using ladders externally are frequently excluded from a general cleaning policy and need adding.
- Sub-contractors. If you use them, check whether your policy covers their work and whether you must verify their own cover. Most tenders require you to.
- Construction sites. Builders cleans on live sites are excluded from some cleaning policies entirely. Tell your insurer if you do them.
What commercial clients ask to see, and when
For a domestic round, nobody will ever ask. The insurance is there for the day something goes wrong, not to win the work.
Commercial is the opposite. Certificates are usually requested at pre-qualification, before your price is even opened, alongside your risk assessment, COSHH assessments and method statement. A contractor who can produce all of it within a day of being asked wins work that a cheaper competitor loses on paperwork alone.
Keep the certificates somewhere you can reach them from a phone, and diarise the renewal dates. The most common failure is not being uninsured, it is being unable to find the certificate in the two days a tender allows.