Business Liability Insurance Cost Estimator

What drives the cost of general liability insurance for a small business

General liability (GL) insurance is the baseline policy almost every small business eventually carries. It covers third-party claims, a customer injured on your premises, damage your work causes to a client's property, or a product that injures someone, up to your policy limit.

It does not cover your own property or equipment, your employees' injuries, professional mistakes, or a data breach, each of those is a separate policy with its own pricing.

Industry is the single biggest factor in what you pay. Insureon, which tracks median cost data across roughly 100,000 small business owners who bought policies through its platform, reports consulting and IT businesses paying around $32 a month, while a full-service restaurant averages $141 a month, more than four times as much, because the underlying claim risk is genuinely that different.

A laptop-based consultant rarely injures a client or damages property; a restaurant serving food to the public, with slip-and-fall risk, foodborne illness exposure, and constant foot traffic, carries meaningfully higher odds of a claim.

Employee count and revenue both push the price up too, though Insureon does not publish an exact multiplier for either one, only that both factors increase premium. This tool applies that adjustment as a disclosed estimate on top of the sourced industry base rate, anchored so a typical small operation (2 to 4 employees, $50,000 to $200,000 in revenue, Insureon's own baseline customer profile) matches the sourced figure exactly, scaling up modestly from there as your business grows.

It is worth being precise about what this tool is not. The already-live home business insurance rider calculator on this site covers a different, narrower situation: a small endorsement added to an existing homeowners or renters policy, capped at a low coverage limit and intended for a low-traffic home-based operation.

This tool estimates a standalone commercial general liability policy, the kind of coverage almost any small business, home-based or not, needs once it has real revenue, employees, or regular client contact that a homeowners endorsement was never designed to cover.

General liability is also usually just one piece of what a small business needs. If you have a physical location, equipment, or inventory in addition to liability exposure, ask about a Business Owners Policy (BOP), which bundles GL with commercial property coverage, often at a discount versus buying each separately.

If you have even one employee, workers' compensation is a separate, often legally required policy that general liability does not touch at all.