Professional Indemnity

What is professional indemnity insurance?

Professional indemnity insurance, often shortened to PI, covers the financial damage your client suffers because of a mistake in your professional work. Wrong advice. A miscalculation. A detail missed in a report. An error in something you designed or delivered.

The word "purely" matters here. Professional indemnity responds when nobody has been injured and nothing has been broken, but your client is out of pocket because of what you did or advised. If there is physical injury or property damage, that is public liability insurance instead.

It is the core business insurance for anyone whose product is thinking rather than physical work. If a client can plausibly say "I followed your advice and it cost me money", professional indemnity is the policy that answers that sentence.

Alongside any compensation, the policy pays your defence costs, in addition to your cover limit and capped at a proportion of it. That can be a substantial part of a claim, because a professional-negligence allegation has to be assessed before anyone knows whether it is well founded.

What counts as a professional mistake

Business owners often assume professional indemnity is about dramatic failures. In practice the claims that arise are ordinary.

• Advice that turns out to be wrong: A recommendation your client acted on, which cost them money.

• A calculation or specification error: A figure transposed, a measurement out, a specification that does not match what was required.

• A detail missed: Something you should have flagged and did not, which the client then had to put right at their own expense.

• An error in a deliverable: A report, a design, a plan or a model your client relied on, which contained a mistake.

• Work that does not do what was agreed: A deliverable the client says was not fit for the purpose you were engaged for.

• Unintentional use of protected material: Using copy, images, code or designs without the licence you needed, patents aside.

Two things to note. First, the trigger is your client's financial loss, not the size of your fee. A modest project can produce a claim many times what you were paid, because the loss belongs to the client's business, not to your invoice. Second, being sued is not the same as being liable. An allegation has to be assessed before anyone knows whether it is well founded, and defending it is exactly what the policy is for.

Professional indemnity or public liability?

A common point of confusion, and the line between the two is clean once you see it.

• Public liability responds to injury to people and damage to property. The trigger is an accident during your work: you drill into a pipe and flood a client's stockroom. It matters most when your work brings you into contact with people, premises or products.

• Professional indemnity responds to purely financial loss. The trigger is a mistake in your professional work: your advice leads a client to a costly wrong decision. It matters most when clients pay you for advice, expertise or deliverables.

Many Irish businesses carry exposure to both, and the two are not alternatives. An information technology (IT) contractor can damage equipment on a client site and can also cause an expensive outage through a configuration error. An interior designer can knock over a client's artwork during a site visit and can also specify a material that turns out to be unsuitable, leaving the client to pay for the work twice. A business coach can have a delegate trip over a cable at a training day and can also design a programme a client says was unfit for the purpose they paid for.

Where both apply to your activities, you can hold them in one Insify policy, which means one renewal date and one place to manage everything. Not every activity can have both. Professional indemnity is generally not offered for the trades and construction, retail, food and hospitality, hair and beauty, hotels, sport and leisure venues such as gyms and bowling alleys, performing arts and galleries, dance schools, land transport and courier work, or security work. Your quote shows which of the two you are offered. Read more about public liability insurance, or see how the two work together for a specific profession on our personal trainer insurance page.

Is professional indemnity insurance mandatory in Ireland?

Professional indemnity insurance isn't required by law in Ireland, and nor is public liability or employers' liability. The exception is a small number of regulated professions whose own regulator sets insurance requirements that carry statutory force. If that might be you, your professional body or regulator is the authority on it, not us.

What does happen, frequently, is that somebody else makes it a condition:

• Clients write it into contracts, usually with a minimum cover limit stated

• Certain professional bodies and membership schemes require members in practice to hold cover as a condition of registration or membership

• Public-sector and larger private tenders treat it as a qualification requirement

So the practical position for a lot of Irish professionals is that cover is not compulsory, but the work you want is not available without it. If you are unsure what applies to your own profession, your professional body or regulator is the authority on that, not us.

Who needs professional indemnity insurance

The test is simple: do clients pay you for advice, expertise or a deliverable they will rely on? If yes, you carry professional-indemnity exposure.

Consultants and advisers. Strategy, organisational and change consulting, management consulting, auditing and certification, market research, and anyone whose engagement ends in a set of recommendations.

Information technology, software and tech. IT consulting, development, implementation and support. A configuration error, a missed requirement or a piece of logic that behaves differently in production can cost a client real money without breaking anything physical.

Marketing, design and creative. Marketing consulting, branding, graphic and digital design, copywriting, editing, proofreading and translation. The exposure runs from campaign errors through to intellectual-property and confidentiality problems in delivered work.

Human resources and recruitment. Human resources (HR) consulting and recruiting, where a placement or a process failure has a financial consequence for the client.

Coaching, training and education. Business, executive, performance and life coaching, plus training delivery, course design, e-learning and teaching. If a client says a programme was unfit for the purpose they engaged you for, that is a financial-loss allegation.

Interior design and space planning. Interior architects, interior and spatial designers and interior stylists are all covered for design and specification work on commercial and residential interiors, including materials, finishes and lighting. What sits outside the policy is architectural and engineering work beyond interior design, and construction or project supervision. See the exclusions below.

Administrative support. Word processing, drafting documents and presentations, minute-taking and agenda management, where errors in what you produce carry through to your client's decisions.

Accounting and payroll advisory work. Advice on cash management, accounting and management reporting, outsourced payroll administration, and advice on audits. An error in the figures you produce carries a direct and measurable cost for the client. Note that this covers advisory and administrative work, and that statutory audit and regulated tax practice sit outside it.

Wellbeing, therapy and movement. Personal trainers, yoga and pilates instructors, massage therapists, hypnotherapists and complementary therapists can hold professional indemnity alongside their public liability cover. The public liability policy responds when a client is physically injured. Professional indemnity responds to the separate case where a client says a plan, programme or course of treatment you designed left them financially worse off.

Before you assume you are in scope, two things to check. Medical services and financial services fall outside this policy, so insurance and investment intermediaries are not covered here for their core work. And professional indemnity is not offered for every activity we insure: it is unavailable for the trades and construction, retail, food and hospitality, hair and beauty, hotels, sport and leisure venues, performing arts and galleries, dance schools, land transport and courier work, and security work, where the risk we cover is physical rather than financial. The activities you select when you apply decide what you are actually covered for, and your quote shows the result before you commit.

What your policy covers

Insify professional indemnity cover includes:

• The financial damage your client suffers because of a professional error, an oversight or wrong advice

• Your defence costs, along with mitigation costs and statutory interest. Mitigation costs are what you reasonably spend to limit a loss that has already happened. Statutory interest is the interest that accrues on compensation between the claim and the payment. All three are paid on top of your cover limit, capped at a proportion of it. The claimant's own legal costs work the other way: they come out of your cover limit rather than on top of it

• Full claims handling, so we deal with whoever is holding you liable and arrange legal help

• For switchers, work from up to five years before cover starts may be covered if the prior-insurance and reporting conditions are met. See the retroactive-cover section below

• Your choice of cover limit (the maximum paid for a claim): €125,000, €250,000, €500,000, €1 million or €1.25 million per claim, with up to twice that amount in total across an insurance year

• Your choice of excess (the amount you pay yourself towards a claim), from €0 to €2,500 per claim

For some professional activities, cover for unintentionally infringing someone else's intellectual property is included too, patents aside. This applies to a specific set of activities rather than all of them, publishing, film and video production, advertising and marketing agencies, photography, graphic and web design, animation and games among them, so check your quote.

Terms, conditions and underwriting criteria may apply.

As with all Insify cover, we insure the activities you declare. That is why the application asks what you actually advise on and deliver, and why your quote shows the inclusions and exclusions that attach to those specific activities.

What professional indemnity does not cover

The exclusions depend on your activity. These are some important boundaries, not an exhaustive list:

• Items such as your own fees, lost profit and costs of meeting your contract.

• Making promises of results or accepting liability beyond ordinary legal liability.

• Matters attributable to cyberattack, hacking or social engineering.

• Activities excluded by your policy, including specified structural, regulated or medical work.

Terms, conditions and underwriting criteria may apply. Further exclusions attach to particular professional activities, and you see the ones that apply to you before you buy.

How much does professional indemnity insurance cost in Ireland?

Insify professional indemnity cover starts from €10.80 per month, based on our IE pricing as at July 2026. That is a starting price rather than an average, and it applies at the lower end of the profession, turnover and cover-limit range.

Your actual premium is driven by:

1. Your profession and your declared activities. The biggest driver, because the size of a plausible claim differs enormously between, say, a proofreader and a management consultant advising on a capital project.

2. Your annual revenue. A proxy for the scale of the work you take on and the clients you take it on for.

3. The cover limit you choose. Moving from €125,000 to €1.25 million changes the maximum exposure your policy carries.

4. The excess you choose. A higher excess lowers your monthly premium.

Your excess, in plain terms. Your excess is the part of each claim you pay yourself before your insurance covers the rest. On a claim of €3,000 with an excess of €250, you pay €250 and Insify covers €2,750. It applies per claim, and you choose it when you apply.

Which excess options you see depends on your annual revenue:

• Up to €500,000 revenue: €0, €250, €500, €1,000 or €2,500. The standard option is €500.

• Above €500,000 revenue: €500, €1,000 or €2,500. The standard option is €1,000.

When comparing quotes, look past the monthly figure. The things that change what you are actually buying are the cover limit, the excess, whether past work is picked up, the exclusions attaching to your activities, and whether you are locked into a 12-month contract. With Insify there is no fixed term, and you can cancel any day.

Choosing your cover limit

Your cover limit is the maximum paid out for a claim. Insify offers €125,000, €250,000, €500,000, €1 million and €1.25 million per claim, with €250,000 as the standard option, and up to twice the per-claim amount in total across an insurance year.

Three questions usually settle it:

• What do your contracts and your professional body require? If a client contract, a tender or a membership condition states a minimum, that is your floor.

• How large is the loss a client could suffer? Not your fee, their exposure. If your work feeds a decision worth several hundred thousand euro, your fee is a poor guide to the claim.

• How many claims could plausibly arise in one year? The annual total is capped at twice the per-claim limit.

We give you the information and the options so you can make the call. We do not provide regulated advice and we do not charge an advice fee. If you would rather talk it through first, you can call, email or message us.

Claims-made cover, explained plainly

Professional indemnity insurance is written on a claims-made basis. This is different from public liability, and it is the single most important mechanical thing to understand about the policy.

Claims-made cover generally requires a claim or relevant circumstance to reach us while the policy is active, and the error must fall within the insured period or meet the prior-work conditions. Limited post-expiry reporting provisions also apply. Tell us promptly about a problem that could lead to a claim.

Why it is written this way: financial-loss claims surface long after the work. A specification error might only be discovered when the building is in use. Advice given in one year might only prove costly in the next. Insurers therefore attach the cover to the moment the claim appears rather than the moment the work happened.

Two practical consequences follow, and they are the subject of the next two sections. Cover for work you did before this policy started is handled by retroactive cover. A lapse or cancellation can leave you exposed to later claims, so check the limited reporting provisions before ending cover.

Switching insurer: cover for past work

If you are moving to Insify from another insurer, work from up to five years before your policy starts may be covered if it meets the prior-insurance and reporting conditions. The error must have been insured at the time, unknown when this cover began, and unable to be claimed or reported under the previous policy or its run-off period. Your schedule and wording set out the full conditions.

That last condition is the one to read twice. Retroactive cover picks up your past work on the assumption you were continuously insured for it. It is not a way to buy cover for uninsured years after the fact. So if you have had a gap, the work done during that gap is not picked up.

The practical rule with claims-made cover is that continuity is the thing to protect. Switching insurer is straightforward. Letting cover lapse between policies is what creates a hole, and the hole is permanent.

Stopping or winding down

Claims and circumstances should be reported promptly. Speak to us before ending your policy. Limited reporting provisions apply after cover ends, including claims arising from a circumstance already reported during cover and certain matters first received in the last month and reported within a month after cover ends.

This matters when you retire, close the business, change career or move to employment. Your work stops, but your clients' ability to bring a claim about it does not, and these limited reporting provisions are not open-ended protection for future claims.

So the sequence matters. If you are planning to stop, talk to us before you cancel rather than after, while your cover is still live. Cancelling first and asking afterwards is what leaves past work exposed.

How a professional indemnity claim works

A professional indemnity claim rarely starts with a solicitor's letter. It usually starts with a client raising a problem, and the earliest sign is often a conversation about putting something right.

Tell us as soon as you become aware of a claim, or of a circumstance that could turn into one. Reporting early is a policy condition on claims-made cover, and it is also the point at which we are most useful.

From there we take it on. We assess whether you are actually liable, and for how much. We deal with the client or their solicitor directly, so the correspondence is not landing in your inbox. We arrange legal help where it is needed and pay for it, within the limits set out in your policy documents. Where the allegation is unfounded, we say so on your behalf and defend it. Where you are liable, we pay what is due within your cover limit, less your excess.

Insify is an insurance intermediary, not the insurer. We arrange and administer your policy and handle your claim, and the cover itself is underwritten by our insurance partner, named in your policy documents.

If you are ever unhappy with how a claim has been handled, tell us and we will deal with it under our complaints procedure. If we do not resolve it, eligible customers can refer the matter to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman (FSPO). Eligibility and time limits are set by the Ombudsman, and the details are in our terms of business.

Indemnity insurance: the terms you will come across

Professional indemnity carries more jargon than most business policies. Here is what the terms actually mean.

• Indemnity means being put back in the position you were in before the loss. Indemnity insurance is simply insurance that does that.

• Cover limit, also called the limit of indemnity in the Irish market, is the maximum paid for a claim.

• Excess is the part of each claim you pay yourself. This is the Irish and British term. American material uses a different word for the same idea, which is one way to tell you are not reading about the Irish market.

• Claims-made means the policy responds based on when the claim is made, not when the work was done.

• Retroactive cover, sometimes called a retroactive date, is cover for work done before your current policy started.

• Professional negligence is the legal ground most of these claims are brought on: a failure to meet the standard of care reasonably expected of someone in your profession.

• Mitigation costs are what you reasonably spend to limit a loss that has already happened.

• Policy documents are what actually govern your cover. Where a summary and your policy documents disagree, the policy documents are what count.

Where in the world you are covered is set out in your policy documents and on your quote.

How to arrange professional indemnity insurance with Insify

The whole process is online, and you arrange it yourself.

1. Tell us your profession and your activities. This shapes both your cover and its exclusions, so it is worth being accurate rather than approximate.

2. Give us your size. Annual revenue and number of people, including yourself.

3. Choose your cover limit and your excess. You see the price move as you change them.

4. Check your quote. It sets out the inclusions and exclusions that apply to your declared activities.

5. Set your start date and pay monthly. Get your quote in minutes. Cover starts on the date you choose, from tomorrow. There is no fixed term, and you can cancel any day.

Not sure what you need yet? Our online guidance answers your questions as you go, so you understand the cover before you need it.

Cover and exclusions described on this page are indicative and non-contractual. Only the terms of your policy apply.