Hiscox Tradesman Insurance

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Hiscox has been underwriting at Lloyd's since the Roberts agency began writing marine risks in 1901, and the family name has sat on Syndicate 33 since 1967. The group moved its domicile to Bermuda in 2006 and remains listed in London, where it reported insurance contract written premium of $4,979.0m for 2025 against $4,703.7m the year before, a combined ratio of 87.8% and profit before tax of $732.7m. That combined ratio was its strongest in ten years.

None of which is why a plumber ends up on hiscox.co.uk. That happens because Hiscox sells liability cover direct, with no broker in the middle, and will price a sole trader online in about five minutes. Public liability opens at £5.20 a month and stretches to a £10 million limit. Tool cover is quoted separately from £7.20 a month. The company says it insures 460,000 UK businesses, and its trades page names them individually: carpenters, gardeners and landscapers, plumbers, electricians, handymen, locksmiths, painters and decorators, plasterers, gas engineers, pest controllers, upholsterers, bathroom and kitchen fitters, fencing contractors and cabinet makers.

What arrives at the end of that quote is not a shrink-wrapped trade package. It is a set of separate covers you select yourself — liability, tools, indemnity, accident, legal — each with its own limit and its own schedule. That design is the best and the most demanding thing about buying here, and it is worth understanding before you click through.

What the £5.20 headline is measuring

The asterisk matters. Hiscox defines that price as an average of all public liability policies sold to at least 10% of its customer base between April 2025 and April 2026. It is the typical price paid by the largest slice of its book, not a floor and not an entry rate. A landscaper hauling equipment between third-party gardens is a different risk from a bookkeeper, and Hiscox lists the things that move the number: turnover, trade hazard, premises, whether you work at customers' sites, your safety record, the limit you pick and the extras you bolt on.

The liability wording itself is more generous than the price suggests in places. Defence costs are covered alongside the claim. If you are called to court over a covered matter, Hiscox pays compensation for the time — £250 a day for you, a partner or a director, £100 a day for any other employee, capped at £10,000 across the policy year. Products claims carry their own single aggregate limit and their own excess rather than sharing the main one, and pollution claims sit under a further aggregate that also swallows their defence costs.

Two figures are absent from every public page: the excess and the standard limit tiers. The wording repeatedly says both are "shown in the schedule", so you will not know what you are carrying until the quote is in front of you. Most trade contracts and local authority frameworks specify a limit in writing, so check that number before you buy rather than after.

Assembling the cover one module at a time

The parts on offer are professional indemnity to £10 million, public and products liability, employers' liability, tool and portable equipment cover, cyber and data, legal protection for contract disputes and debt recovery, personal accident, equipment breakdown and business contents. Personal accident is the one to read twice: the cover responds once you have been unable to work for more than two weeks, so a fortnight off with a broken wrist produces nothing.

There is one honest gap and Hiscox flags it plainly. On the trades page, under tool insurance for builders, the site says: "Hiscox doesn't provide this cover. But we can connect you to our builders' insurance partner today." A builder can still buy liability here; the kit in the van goes somewhere else, on someone else's terms, with a second renewal date to remember.

Contract works — the cover that pays for the half-built extension if it burns down before handover — is not described on any of the construction and trades pages. Given that JCT and similar contracts routinely require it, a builder or main contractor should confirm directly with Hiscox whether it can be added rather than assume the absence is an oversight. We could not verify it from the published material.

Who is actually carrying the risk

The policy is written by Hiscox Insurance Company Limited, registered number 70234, at 22 Bishopsgate, London EC2N 4BQ. It is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by both the FCA and the PRA, under firm reference number 113849 — a number you can put into the FCA Register yourself. The sales and administration side runs through Hiscox Underwriting Ltd, registered number 02372789 at the same address and regulated by the FCA. Because the insurer and the seller are parts of the same group, there is no broker commission layered on top and no panel deciding which insurer sees your details.

Complaints go first to Hiscox Customer Relations at The Hiscox Building, Peasholme Green, York YO1 7PR, on 0800 116 4627. A firm under the Ombudsman's size ceiling — £6.5 million turnover, fewer than 50 staff, or a balance sheet below £5 million — can take an unresolved complaint on to the Financial Ombudsman Service, provided the act complained of happened on or after 1 April 2019. Cancellation runs on 30 days' written notice with a pro rata refund of the unused premium, and Hiscox states it never charges a fee for cancelling. The general terms also mention a £20 minimum in this context, which is worth pinning down before you cancel part way through a year.

The clauses that decide whether a claim is paid

Notification is tight. A bodily injury claim must reach Hiscox within seven days. Anything else must be reported promptly and confirmed in writing within 30 days. You must not admit liability without prior written agreement, which sounds obvious until a customer is standing in a flooded kitchen waiting for you to say it was your fault.

The wording is also explicit that putting the work right is your bill, not the insurer's: you must take reasonable steps to remedy or rectify, at your own expense, any defect or failure. Liability cover pays for the damage your mistake causes to other people and their property. It does not pay to redo the job. Alongside that sit exclusions for designs, plans, specifications or advice you have given, for the cost of recalling, repairing or replacing a product you supplied, for asbestos, for anything you do deliberately or recklessly, and for pollution unless it came from a sudden, identifiable and unintended incident. Work carried out beyond the geographical limits on your schedule is outside the policy altogether.

Tool cover has its own trap. If the sum you insure is less than 85% of what your equipment is actually worth, any payout is reduced in proportion — insure £4,000 of a £6,000 kit and you are carrying a third of every claim yourself. Theft from an unattended vehicle is excluded unless the items were hidden out of sight in a locked boot or compartment, and unexplained disappearance is not covered at all. Settlement is on a replace-as-new basis for equipment and trade market value for stock, and cover can run UK-only, EU-wide or worldwide depending on what you select.

Reading the badges on the awards page

Hiscox displays a Defaqto five-star rating and it is genuine, but it belongs to the home insurance product, held for 14 consecutive years — not to the liability cover a tradesperson buys. Its own business pages muddle this further, one citing five stars for eleven years and another for fourteen. The Feefo Platinum Trusted Service award for 2026, a seventh consecutive year, sits alongside a 4.8 out of 5 score from 3,888 reviews. The customer-count figures do not line up either: the public liability page claims 460,000 UK businesses, while the main business insurance page says 300,000 small business customers. Both are Hiscox's own pages.

Independent claims data is thinner than it looks. The FCA published its general insurance value measures for calendar year 2025 on 21 July 2026, covering claims acceptance rates and complaints for retail lines — home sits at 62–71% acceptance and motor at 99%. Commercial and liability products are not in that dataset at all, so no published acceptance rate exists for the cover under discussion, from Hiscox or anyone else. Anybody quoting one for tradesman insurance has borrowed it from a different product.

What does exist is Hiscox's own regulatory complaints return. For 1 January to 30 June 2026 it opened 529 complaints and closed 541, with 11% resolved inside three days and the remaining 89% inside eight weeks. Of those closed, 57% were upheld in the customer's favour, and the leading cause was claims handling. The volume is low against the book — 0.86 complaints per 1,000 policies in force — but a majority upheld rate is a majority upheld rate, and it is the company's own published figure. Longer memories will also recall the Supreme Court ruling of January 2021 on pandemic business interruption, where Hiscox was among the insurers whose small-business policies were construed against them.

Figures were taken from each provider's own published terms on 25 August 2026. Variable rates can change at any time — confirm the current rate with the provider before applying.