Electrician Insurance NSW

Unlike Queensland, Electrician Insurance in NSW is very reasonably priced with many insurers competing for your business.

Keep in mind that:

• Prices start around $489 for 12 months or around $45 per month.
• Plenty of insurers to chose from, so pick an insurer that pay claims. (We can help)
• Employ a specialist broker that has skin in the game with you.

CoverTradie’s experience and pricing knowledge has helped many tradies. You just need the right insurance that saves money and prevents claim time headaches. Nothing complicated.

We all need certainty in life. That’s what insurance is for but the insurance industry thrives on you being fearful.

That might be a strategy someone wants to employ to win customers but it’s sure to fail.

CoverTradie’s philosophy is about making things easy and simple for customers. The end result is that they trust us and look after us in the long run.

If you are reading this, chances are that you have two questions in your mind?

• What insurances do I need to be an electrician?
• How much is insurance for an electrical contractor?

You can read about our detailed article here where we have gone into the details that talk about Electrical Contractors Insurance in general.

In this article, we have focussed on the Electrical Contractors Insurance Cost in NSW.

Public Liability Insurance

Most of your customers and almost all of your business contacts want to see a certificate of your Public Liability Insurance before they give you a job.

What is Public Liability Insurance?

Public Liability Insurance is there to protect your business against a financial loss if, due to your work activities, you end up damaging someone else’s property or causing an injury to someone.

For electricians it could mean:

Say a property manager has given you a job to replace a switch at property that is tenanted. Whilst unlikely, the work done wasn’t 100% and resulted in a short circuit causing a power outage for a few hours resulting in food spoilage in the freezer.

The tenant suffered a loss, that loss can be claimed under your public liability insurance.

Your customer can sue you and the costs are covered by the Public Liability Insurance

This is a mandatory insurance that you have to have to get and maintain your electrician’s registration in most states.

The minimum coverage required usually is $5 Million dollars but there would be situations you may need $10 million, $20 million or more. This depends on who you work with, the complexity of your work.

If you work as a subbie to a large business, they are most likely to ask for a $20 Million limit.

What is the cost of Electrician Insurance in NSW?

The cost of Electrician Insurance in NSW starts at $489 for the year or about $45 per month.

What it costs for you will obviously depend on a number of factors.

• Business size – how big is your turnover, staff numbers etc.
• Location/State – state level legislation can have an impact on pricing as it is for Electricians in Queensland & Plumbers in Victoria.
• Activities – Domestic jobs, commercial jobs, railway infrastructure jobs…you get it. They all present a different level of risk and insurers price them separately.
• Do you have any Claims history – an occasional claim mayn’t mean much but a history of frequent claims can result in much higher prices or even difficulty in getting insurances.
• Level of cover etc. – $5Million coverage or $50 Million? These are obviously differently priced risks.

Let us explore further.

First of all, how does the insurance pricing for electrical contractors compare with other common trades in NSW. See chart below:

As you can see that premiums for Electricians aren’t too bad compared to other trades but this premium can vary a little by state.

In the next chart below we show the cheapest premiums we have seen for Electrical Contractors Insurance in different states.

Interesting to note that even though there is no consumer protection legislation in NSW, the premiums there are high compared to all other states.

NSW tends to more expensive in general for “everything” it seems like.

Anyway, that leads us to the next question, what happens as the turnover increases?

Well its simple, the premiums rise with the increase in turnover. You will notice that there is only a small increase from turnover of $100K to $200K but then the changes are bigger.

This is because, insurers think that with turnovers of up to $200K, you are still quite a small business and likely only have 1 or 2 staff.

Less staff numbers means, more controls which translates into lesser events that lead to a claim. Beyond $200K, the number of claims rise and so does the premiums.

See chart below:

Up until now, our conversation has been centred around the $5 million limit for Electrician Insurance. You may be wondering:

What is the cost of 10 million public liability insurance or cost of 20 million public liability insurance?

It’s not uncommon that people need liability limit greater than $5Million. Not a big problem for Electricians.

There is some increase in premium with higher liability limits but its not huge. See table below:

That was just a high level view of Electrician insurance in NSW.

As you can see that there is a lot of pricing options available in the market. Its certainly a bad strategy to pay any more than what you need to. There are some insurers who see electricians as a high risk occupation and others who don’t.

A knowledgable broker can make a difference and we think we know a thing or two about the tradies insurance market so give us a call and we’d be more than happy to sort out insurance for you.

Insurance Types