What does it cost a tradesman when a job goes wrong? Five years of real claims

The short answer

Most tradespeople will have at least one public liability claim in their working life. Over 40 years, that is about 2 in 3 tradespeople, and nearly 4 in 5 electricians and plumbers. Take on staff and the chance goes up. The average claim is €2,900, but 1 in 8 costs more than €5,000, a leak can run past €20,000 and a fire past €100,000. Without cover, that bill is yours. With cover, you pay your excess and the policy pays the rest. Below: what a claim costs in your trade, what usually goes wrong, and how the cover works.

Why this matters

Take Conor. He fits kitchens and bathrooms, on his own, in other people's homes, and he is good at his job. One Tuesday he tightens a connection under a sink, packs up and goes home. The connection was not quite tight. By Thursday, the water is in the kitchen units and under the floor, and the customer is looking at Conor. (Conor is an example. Every figure below is real.)

Insify insures more than 50,000 entrepreneurs. We went through five years of claims from the tradespeople among them. Not because tradespeople are careless. Most of these claims were ordinary working days that went wrong.

When the cover is not there, the money comes out of the business or out of your own pocket. A few thousand euros is a real setback for a sole trader. A fire or a serious leak can be more than a year's profit.

What does a claim cost in your trade?

What a claim costs, and how bad it can get, differs a lot from one trade to the next. Find yours in the table.

How to read it. These are averages across the thousands of tradespeople we insure in our European markets. The working-life figure assumes 40 years in the trade at today's claim rate. A picture of each trade, not a prediction for your business.

Source: Insify claims data, October 2021 to September 2026, rounded.

Bricklayers, tilers, plasterers, pavers, gardeners and heating installers have claims too, some of them just as often. In our files these were mostly broken glazing, damaged worktops and hobs, and cables hit while digging. The same cover applies.

What goes wrong most often?

Most claims are not disasters. They are ordinary accidents in a client's home. Water and electrical damage are the ones that cost more than you would expect: one loose connection in our files ended up at €21,900. Fire is rare, but it is the one that runs into six figures.

Five claims from our files. These are real claims, anonymised and simplified. They are illustrations: what any claim pays depends on its own circumstances.

• Floor layer, €107,500. Flammable material on the job caught fire. The damage to the property ran past €100,000.

• Carpenter, €54,000. He was removing old glue from a beam in an attic. The foil behind it caught fire. The attic burned out.

• Handyman, €21,900. He connected a dishwasher. The connection was not tight. Water ran under the floor and through the kitchen units.

• Handyman, €13,400. He left his ladder at a client's home. The client used it, fell and broke his elbow. A solicitor held the handyman liable.

• Painter, €7,400. A hired scaffold blew over and landed on a parked car. It was an older car, which kept the bill down. On a new one, the same scaffold could have cost tens of thousands.

None of these tradespeople did anything unusual. These were ordinary working days.

The rare ones are the expensive ones. Fire and injury are each about 2 in 100 claims, and they cost the most. The fires in our files average €23,200, and the worst went past €100,000. The injuries include the client who used a handyman's ladder and broke an elbow, €13,400. In Ireland, an injury claim comes with medical bills, lost earnings and legal costs on both sides, so a worse fall costs a great deal more than that. That is what the €2.5 million cover limit on a construction policy is for: not the €900 tile, but the passer-by hit by a slate or the client who fell off your ladder.

Does this sound like you?

Public liability insurance matters most if you:

• work for yourself, in people's homes or gardens;

• work with water, electricity, heat or heavy tools close to other people's belongings;

• dig, drill or saw where cables and pipes can be;

• have people working with you: more hands and more jobs mean more chances of something going wrong;

• have clients, main contractors or local authorities who ask for a certificate before you start.

That describes most handymen, painters, plasterers, tilers, carpenters, gardeners, pavers, bricklayers, plumbers and installers. If that is you, public liability cover for construction trades is built for exactly that.

What does the cover cost, and how does it work?

The price. Cover on a construction policy starts from €21.84 a month, including taxes. Your own price depends on the trades you declare, your turnover and the excess you choose, and you see it before you buy.

The limit. Every construction policy covers up to €2.5 million per claim and €5 million a year. That figure is fixed, so when a main contractor or a tender asks for €2.5 million, you already have it.

The excess. The excess is the part of a claim you pay yourself. You choose it: €0, €250, €500, €1,000 or €2,500, with €500 the usual choice (the two lowest options depend on your turnover). A higher excess means a lower premium.

Items and surfaces in your care. Damage to the fittings, finished surfaces and parts of the building you are working on is covered on every construction policy, up to €25,000 per claim if you work on your own and €50,000 if you have staff.

Faulty craftsmanship. An optional extra. If your finished work turns out faulty, it pays for getting at the fault and putting things back afterwards, not for redoing your own work. Up to €25,000 per claim on your own, €50,000 with staff.

Your own crew. Employers' liability is optional and pays claims brought by the people who work for you, up to €13 million per claim.

How Insify helps

Back to Conor and the kitchen. With cover, the water under the floor is a claim, not a bill. He sends in the photos, the insurer takes over the conversation with the customer, and he gets on with the next job. Half the claims in our files were settled within five weeks. That is what the cover is for: when something goes wrong, and the claim you could not pay yourself.

With Insify you see your own price for public liability cover for your trade in about two minutes, buy online, and cancel any day. If you take on staff, you add employers' liability at the same time.