What Is Commercial Insurance?
Commercial insurance helps protect your company, employees and leadership from unexpected losses.
As a property and casualty insurance company with more than 200 years of experience, we’ve helped protect businesses of all sizes. From small businesses to large corporations, our commercial insurance policies can help protect you and your employees from different risks.
Commercial Property Insurance
helps protect your company’s physical location and business property, including:
- Computer equipment
- Inventory
- Tools
- Furniture
- Accounts receivable
Commercial General Liability Insurance
helps protect your business from claims of:
- Bodily injury
- Property damage
- Libel and slander
- Advertising mistakes
Business Income Insurance
helps replace your business’ lost revenue if you can’t open because of property damage.
Commercial Property Insurance
General Liability Insurance
Business Income Insurance
What Is Commercial Property Insurance?
Commercial property insurance helps protect your owned or rented building, plus the tools and equipment you use to operate your business. It covers losses from many sources, such as:
- Fire
- Burglary
- Theft
- Wind
- Lightning
For home-based business owners, this type of commercial insurance provides more coverage than homeowners insurance. You may have heard other names for this type of insurance, like:
- Commercial building insurance
- Business personal property insurance
- Commercial real estate insurance
- Non-residential building insurance
What Does Commercial Building Insurance Cover?
Commercial building insurance helps protect your business’ physical assets, such as your:
- Building
- Equipment
- Tools
- Inventory
- Furniture
- Personal property
It also includes business interruption insurance. So, if you can’t operate your business because of covered property damage, your policy can help replace your lost income.
How Do You Value Commercial Property for Insurance?
Insurance companies value commercial property in three ways:
- Actual cash value: How much it’d cost to replace an item, minus its depreciation.
- Replacement cost value: How much it’d cost to replace an item with something comparable or equivalent.
- Fair market value: The cost of an item if it were to go on the market today.
What Is General Liability Insurance?
General liability insurance (GLI) is sometimes called business liability insurance or commercial general liability insurance. This type of liability insurance coverage helps protect your business from claims of bodily injury or property damage that can come up during normal business operations. Without general liability coverage, you’d have to pay for medical expenses and property damages out of pocket.
With general liability insurance coverage, you'll have protection from claims of:
Bodily Injury
If a customer injures themselves in your place of business, this policy can help cover their medical bills.
Property Damage
Employees sometimes
damage customers' property while delivering products or services. Your GL policy can help pay for the damages.
Reputational Harm
General liability insurance policies can help cover malicious prosecution,
slander, libel, wrongful eviction and violating a person's privacy.
Advertising Injuries
Claims of copyright infringement are covered with a general liability policy.
Damage to premises rented to you:
If your rented property is damaged by fire, lightning or an explosion, your general liability policy can help pay for repairs.
What Is Business Income Insurance Coverage?
Business income insurance coverage is a type of business insurance that helps your company replace lost income if it’s unable to operate due to covered property damage.
Business income insurance acts as business interruption insurance or income protection insurance. For example, if your business is unable to operate and generate revenue due to fire damage, this insurance helps cover your lost income until you can reopen again. This can help you continue to pay your operating expenses, like payroll and monthly bills.
Best of all, business income coverage is already included in a Business Owner’s Policy (BOP). You can easily increase coverage to meet specific risks by choosing from a variety of optional coverages. You can add these coverages as endorsements to your existing Business Owner’s Policy (BOP).
What Does a Business Income Policy Cover?
Your business interruption coverage pays for your loss of income while you’re recovering from a covered cause of loss. Some costs that business income insurance can help pay for include:
- Mortgage and rent payments
- Employee’s wages and payroll
- Loss of income during the period of restoration
- Loan payments
- Tax payments
Restoration Period
The restoration period for business income insurance begins when your business is physically damaged and you need to shut down. It ends when your property is repaired and ready to reopen. Our standard business income coverage has a zero-hour waiting period, which means coverage goes into effect when there’s a loss.
Business Income Coverage Exclusions
Business income insurance doesn’t cover property damage. It pays for your loss of income during repairs or replacement of your damaged property. For instance, you’ll need commercial property insurance to help pay the costs of physical damage to your business. Business income insurance also doesn’t help pay for your loss of business income from certain extreme weather events or pandemics.
Who Needs Business Income Coverage?
Business income insurance is important if fire, theft or wind damage can potentially shut down your operation. This policy can help cover your business while you repair or replace your business property. In some cases, you may want to increase your business income coverage by adding endorsements. You can add these endorsements to your existing Business Owner’s Policy (BOP).
You should consider endorsements if your business relies on:
- A physical location
- Equipment
- Other property to generate income
For example, businesses that may need business income insurance endorsements include:
- Software companies that rely on physical and digital property. This includes offices, computers, servers and cloud storage.
- Service businesses, such as hair salons that depend on a physical location and tools to serve customers.
- Retail stores and businesses that need online or brick-and-mortar storefronts to display products.
How Does Business Income Coverage Work?
We designed this insurance to help protect your business’ income from a variety of risks. If you can’t run your business because of damaged property from fire, theft or wind, this policy can help replace some of the lost income.
To ensure our coverage is comprehensive, we offer a broad range of insurance options and extensions. For instance, civil authority coverage can help extend your business income insurance if a covered loss damages your property and a civil authority doesn’t allow you to access your business.
Business Income Extension for Essential Personnel
It can be difficult for businesses to continue operations when employees are unexpectedly absent. If this happens, business income insurance can help cover the cost of lost business earnings. It can also help cover extra expenses resulting from an employee absence. This allows you to continue to run your business.
While this coverage is intended to protect your loss of income following damage to the property you use in your business operations and isn’t intended to provide coverage for accidents or illnesses.
Business Income Extension for Cloud Service Interruption
Many businesses depend on cloud storage operations to maintain data. They often use cloud storage to transfer important files to:
- Vendors
- Clients
- Employees
This optional coverage can help pay for your lost income due to an unplanned and unexpected outage of your business’ cloud service.
Business Income Extension for Off Premises Operations
The risk of damage to equipment and tools may increase when businesses are working at an off premise jobsite. For example, say you own a construction company and have to stop working when you notice damaged equipment on a jobsite. Business income extension insurance can help cover the resulting lost income. It can also help cover costs for renting replacement equipment.
Business Income Extension for Off Premises Utility Services
This coverage can help cover lost income and additional expenses that result from an interruption in utility services. This includes power, communications and water services that get interrupted.
Business Income for Dependent Properties
Many businesses depend on third parties to operate, like:
- A shipper who delivers products that you need in order to do business with clients
- An anchor store whose customers or employees do business with you
- A manufacturer who builds your product
If a third party is unable to operate due to a covered loss, your business may suffer. Business income for dependent properties can help cover lost business income resulting from a third party that doesn’t deliver products or services your business relies on.
Business Income Extension for Electronic Vandalism
Businesses fall victim to electronic attacks more than you may realize. This extension is an optional coverage to help protect you in case of electronic attacks. For example, say your business’ website gets attacked and as a result, you aren’t able to generate income. This coverage can help pay the resulting loss of income.
Extended Business Income
Many businesses have trouble regaining their prior level of income after a covered peril or event occurs. For example, say your pet grooming business closes for several weeks due to a covered loss. Upon reopening, you may find that many of your old customers found new pet groomers. Extended business income coverage can help replace the lost income while you build back your business.