General Liability Insurance: What It Covers and What It Costs by Industry

What general liability actually protects against

General liability (GL) insurance covers third-party claims, meaning claims from someone outside your business, not your own losses. That includes a customer slipping and falling on your premises, your work accidentally damaging a client's property, or a product you sold causing an injury after the sale.

It pays for the other party's medical bills, property repair, or legal defense costs, up to your policy limit.

It does not cover everything a small business is exposed to, and the gaps matter. Damage to your own equipment or inventory is a commercial property policy's job, not GL's.

An employee hurt on the job falls under workers' compensation, a separate, often legally required policy the moment you hire your first employee. A mistake in professional advice or a service you performed, the kind of claim that costs a client money rather than injuring them physically, falls under professional liability (also called errors and omissions, or E&O), covered in more detail in general liability vs. professional liability. And a data breach needs its own cyber liability policy, GL does not touch it.

Why your industry alone can mean a 4x difference in price

Insureon, which tracks median cost data across roughly 100,000 small business owners who bought GL through its platform, publishes a per-industry breakdown that makes the pattern obvious. A consulting or IT business pays around $384 a year.

A retail store runs about $500, an e-commerce shop about $504, a cleaning service about $580, and a cafe or coffee shop about $564. Contracting work runs noticeably higher, a general contractor around $981 and a specialty or installation contractor around $1,050.

Food service tops the list: a fast food restaurant averages $1,296, and a full-service restaurant averages $1,691, roughly 4.4x what the cheapest industry on this list pays for the same kind of policy.

None of that spread is arbitrary. A consultant working from a laptop with no client visits rarely injures anyone or damages property. A restaurant serving food to the public carries slip-and-fall risk, foodborne illness exposure, and constant foot traffic, all of which show up directly in claims data and, in turn, in the premium.

How employee count and revenue move the price from there

Insureon's own data confirms that both a business's headcount and its revenue push the premium up further, without publishing an exact multiplier for either factor. As an illustration only, not a sourced figure, scaling the consulting/IT base rate above by two disclosed estimate bands, roughly 10 to 19 employees and $500,000 to $1,000,000 in revenue, moves the estimate from $384 a year to roughly $700 a year.

The exact shape of that curve is not published by Insureon or any other source found during research, so treat it as directionally right, prices rise with size, rather than a precise formula.

What usually comes next

General liability is rarely the only policy a small business carries once it is past the earliest stage. If you have a physical location, equipment, or inventory, a Business Owners Policy (BOP) bundles GL with commercial property coverage, often at a discount versus buying each separately.

The moment you hire your first employee, workers' compensation becomes a separate, usually mandatory policy that GL does not touch at all. And if your business gives advice, designs something, or performs a professional service where a mistake could cost a client money rather than physically hurt them, professional liability covers a real gap that GL was never designed to fill, see the full comparison for exactly how the two differ and what each one costs.