Pub Insurance
Pub insurance is sold as a package and renewed as a package, which is why so many of them quietly stop fitting the business inside them. A pub is a building, a cellar, a kitchen, a licence, a payroll and increasingly a few letting rooms, and every one of those is a separate insurance question. The policy has to protect the premises and the income the premises produces, because the closures that cost most are frequently the ones that damage nothing. This page sets out what a licensed-trade programme has to cover, what the law actually compels, and the questions worth settling before a kitchen fire rather than after one.
Premises and Income
A licensed-trade programme is assembled, not taken off a shelf. Buildings or tenant’s improvements, contents and stock, guests’ property, money, employers’ liability, public and products liability, business interruption, equipment breakdown, deterioration of refrigerated stock and legal expenses. Insurance for pubs is usually quoted as one product, and that product is only ever as good as the sections somebody actually checked.
The building, and whose building it is. On a freehold the structure is yours. On a lease or a tied tenancy it is frequently the pub company’s or the landlord’s, and the fit-out, the kitchen, the cellar equipment and the trade contents are yours. Those are two completely different schedules, and the commonest error in the trade is assuming somebody else’s certificate covers your interest.
The liabilities, which run wider than most operators expect. Public liability for customers, visitors and contractors on your premises. Products liability for what you serve, which in a food-led pub is the larger half. Employers’ liability for staff, including casual and function staff. And guests’ property liability the moment you let a room.
Then the income, which is where pubs are under-insured. Business interruption has to be built on an income split — wet, food, accommodation and events — with an indemnity period long enough for the slowest of them to recover. Loss-of-licence and cancellation sections have their own triggers rather than following the property damage, and no wording should be read as covering every forced closure.
Where this page stops. A restaurant or a bar without a pub’s wet trade belongs on our restaurant and bar insurance page, and an operator running rooms as the main business belongs on our hotel insurance page. Cyber matters wherever bookings, card payments or an outsourced reservation system do.
One Licence, Four Businesses
Four kinds of licensed premises, and an insurer reads them as four different businesses. A quiet community local, a food-led pub, a pub with letting rooms and a late-opening bar share a licence and very little else.
Wet-led trade, regulars, a small kitchen or none, and a building often older than the business in it. The questions are the reinstatement figure on solid-wall or listed construction, the cellar and its cooling, and how much trade walks elsewhere during a closure. Licensed premises insurance rated on turnover alone misses all three.
Food is most of the turnover now, which changes the risk rather than adding to it. A commercial kitchen brings extraction cleaning, hot works, allergen handling and the largest single fire exposure on the site. A kitchen closure takes the dining income with it while the bar carries on at a fraction of what the business was earning.
Letting rooms puts you in the accommodation trade: guests’ property, occupancy and escape arrangements, and booking income that cancels rather than simply pauses. Four or five rooms above a pub are routinely written as though they were a storeroom, and the first anyone hears of it is a claim for a guest’s belongings.
Late hours, entertainment, door staff and a different crowd change the liability profile and the licence risk together. Glass, assaults, noise complaints and licence reviews belong here rather than on a village local, and licensed trade insurance priced as though it were a food-led pub rarely survives a claim year.
Most operators are running two of these at once — a food-led pub that opens late at weekends, or a local that has just taken the rooms upstairs back into use. That is normal, and it is why so many policies are still written for the business as it was on the day they were placed. The half of the trade built since is the half that turns out to be under-insured.
Duties, Not Products
No law requires you to buy a product called pub insurance, and there is no universal requirement to hold a pub or hotel package at all. Employers’ liability is compulsory if you employ anyone and motor duties apply to vehicles used on a road. What compels the rest is a lease, a pub company agreement, a lender, or a condition attached to the premises licence.
Fire safety is the duty that bites hardest. The Fire Safety Order applies to relevant premises in England and Wales, including sleeping accommodation, and responsible persons must address fire risks, precautions and evacuation. Serious breaches can bring notices, prohibition and prosecution. Buying property insurance is not evidence of fire-safety compliance, and a prohibition notice closes the premises whatever the schedule says.
Food and allergens are two exposures, not one. Food businesses must follow the applicable food-safety, hygiene and allergen-information rules — the Food Safety Act 1990, the relevant hygiene regulations and the Food Information Regulations 2014, with devolved differences. Official allergen guidance identifies criminal offences for failures in specified allergen labelling requirements. The injured customer’s civil claim and the authority’s prosecution are separate matters, and only one of them is an insurance question.
The licence is its own regime. In England and Wales, licensable activities under the Licensing Act 2003 require the appropriate authorisation, and GOV.UK states that unauthorised licensable activity at premises can bring a fine and up to six months’ imprisonment, or both. Scotland and Northern Ireland use different alcohol-licensing systems. A loss-of-licence section is not a substitute licence and buys no permission to ignore a condition.
And Martyn’s Law is preparation, not a live duty. The SIA expects the operational regime in spring 2027, so the sensible position today is to work out which tier a venue would fall into and what it would have to do, rather than behave as though the requirements already applied. Health and safety, employment, data, gas and equipment duties apply alongside all of this.
The practical consequence is that the fire risk assessment, the premises licence and the insurance schedule need reading together, by somebody who has read all three. They almost never are, and the distance between what the licence permits and what the policy assumed is one of the commonest things we find on a licensed-trade account.
Confirm, Do Not Assume
Four questions that decide whether a licensed-trade policy actually responds. Each has a written answer, and each is far cheaper to settle now than during a closure.
Establish in writing who insures the structure and who insures your improvements. On a lease or tied tenancy the building is usually the landlord’s or the pub company’s while the fit-out, kitchen and cellar plant are yours. Somebody else’s certificate is not cover for your interest, and a rent demand is not a schedule.
Loss-of-licence and cancellation sections carry their own triggers, and they are rarely the ones operators assume. Confirm what brings the section into play, what is excluded and what it actually pays. It responds to the financial consequence of losing the authorisation, not to the conduct that lost it, and it is not a licence.
Collect wet, food, accommodation and events income separately, then set the indemnity period against the slowest of them to recover. A kitchen rebuild and a licence review run to very different timescales. Cancellation of a function is not automatically the same loss as premises interruption, and twelve months is a default.
A pub can lose trade through access restrictions with no damage to its own building — a fire next door, a police cordon, a flooded road. Any denial-of-access extension must be checked rather than assumed. Where disease cover exists, read its geographical, causation and notification conditions before relying on it.
Four written answers. Most of the licensed-trade policies we review can produce one, usually the building, because somebody asked at the start and nobody has asked since. The loss-of-licence trigger is almost never among them. If yours answers all four it is properly arranged, and we will say so rather than inventing a reason to move it.
The Fact-Find
A pub cannot be rated from a turnover figure. Hospitality insurance is priced on the premises, the licence, the kitchen and the money through the till.
The building, its age and construction, and the fire arrangements inside it: kitchen extraction and how often the ductwork is cleaned, hot works during refurbishment, combustible panels, occupancy and escape routes, and whether the premises close seasonally. Flood exposure and the cellar belong in this answer too.
The premises licence itself, the permitted hours and every licensable activity on it. Entertainment, functions, outside events, door staff and late opening each change the liability profile, and so does a late licence that is used only twice a year. Send us the licence itself rather than a description of what is written on it.
Whether you serve food and on what scale, allergen handling, refrigeration and food spoilage, and the equipment the kitchen cannot trade without. Where you let rooms, add the room count, the maximum occupancy and guests’ valuables — an insurer treats letting accommodation as another trade altogether, not as an extra.
The turnover split across wet, food, accommodation and events, the stock and equipment values behind it, how much cash is on the premises and held overnight, security and CCTV, any outsourced booking or card-payment dependency you rely on, and claims history including anything that happened at a previous premises.
The change that matters most and gets reported least is a change of trade. A kitchen goes in, the rooms come back into use, the licence is extended to one o’clock, EV chargers appear in the car park, a spa is added, or the business moves from owner-operated to a management company. None of those feels like an insurance event and every one of them changes the risk — which is why a licensed-trade account needs a call when something changes rather than a conversation once a year. Renewal is the worst possible moment to find out.
Named People, Not a Call Centre
Choosing a hospitality insurance broker comes down to who actually asks the right questions — the licence, the kitchen, the cellar and the income split. Four people, and you deal with them directly rather than through an account team.
Paula Hunter has been in the insurance industry for over thirty years and looks after a full range of commercial clients, working closely with the team on renewals — which on a licensed-trade account is where the trade that was quoted and the trade now being run get reconciled. Helen Snowdon provides her internal support and has worked in broking for over forty years, so a question about a schedule, a licence change or a mid-term alteration goes to somebody who has seen the answer before.
Oliver Mayhew works in our Small Business Unit, which is where a single-site pub account sits and where most of these enquiries begin. Colin Thompson is our Claims Manager with over eighteen years in the role, and a pub claim is rarely one claim: a kitchen fire is property damage, spoiled stock, lost dining income and a function nobody can now hold. Claims are handled in house from notification onwards, and the rest of the team is on our team page.
Pub Insurance Enquiry
Park is an independent commercial insurance broker in Durham, arranging cover for pubs, bars and licensed premises across the North East and UK-wide. Six questions and an optional upload. The two most useful documents are the premises licence and the lease or tenancy agreement, because between them they usually settle what has to be insured, by whom, and for how long. Public house insurance written without reading either is written on an assumption. One working day, no fee and no obligation either way.
Common Questions
A package rather than a single cover: buildings or tenant’s improvements, contents, stock and money, public and products liability, employers’ liability, business interruption, equipment breakdown, deterioration of refrigerated stock, legal expenses and, where you let rooms, guests’ property. Loss-of-licence and cancellation sections sit alongside those with triggers of their own. Which sections you need, and at what level, depends on whether you hold the freehold, how much of the turnover is food, and whether you let rooms or open late.
Not as a product. There is no universal requirement to buy a pub or hotel package. Employers’ liability is compulsory if you employ anyone, and motor duties apply to vehicles used on a road. Everything else is driven by a lease, a pub company agreement, a lender or a condition on the premises licence. Hospitality business insurance is a market label, not a legal category. Separately, the fire-safety, food-safety and licensing regimes impose duties on the business whether or not you are insured, and insurance does not discharge any of them.
Often it does, and that is not the same as you being covered. On a lease or a tied tenancy the structure is frequently insured by the pub company or the landlord while the fit-out, the kitchen, the cellar plant, the trade contents and the stock remain yours. Get it in writing: who insures the structure, who insures improvements, whose interest is actually noted, and what happens to your income if the building is out of use. A certificate in somebody else’s name tells you very little about your own position.
It responds to the financial consequence of losing the authorisation, not to whatever caused the loss. It is not a substitute licence, it buys no permission to ignore a condition, and it will not help with the underlying breach. The triggers are specific and they are rarely the ones operators assume, so confirm in writing what brings the section into play, what is excluded and what it pays. It is the section most often present on a schedule and least often understood by the business holding it.
Only if the wording says so, and you should not assume it does. A pub can lose trade through access restrictions with no damage to its own building — a fire next door, a cordon, a flooded road — but any denial-of-access extension has to be checked rather than taken for granted. The same applies to disease cover, which should only ever be read against its actual geographical, causation and notification conditions. No licensed-trade policy should be described as covering every forced closure.
Yes, and it is the change least often reported. A commercial kitchen brings the largest fire exposure on the site along with extraction cleaning, hot works and allergen handling. Letting rooms puts you in the accommodation trade, with guests’ property, occupancy and escape arrangements and booking income that cancels rather than pauses. Both change how the risk is rated and both change what the indemnity period needs to be. Tell us when it happens rather than at renewal.
Not in the way people hope. Buying property insurance is not evidence of fire-safety compliance, and a prohibition notice closes the premises whatever your schedule says. Criminal fines are not insurable, and the cost of complying with a regulatory order is not the same thing as insured loss. Some policies fund legal defence costs, which is a separate question from the penalty itself and worth checking rather than assuming. The protection against enforcement is the risk assessment, not the policy.
Yes. Send the premises licence, the lease or tenancy agreement and your current schedule, and we will tell you whether the building and your improvements are insured by the people you think, whether the indemnity period matches the slowest part of the trade to recover, what the loss-of-licence section actually triggers on, and whether anything is being paid for twice. If it is correctly arranged we will say so, and there is no fee either way.
