Business liability insurance in New Zealand
A complete guide to commercial-liability cover for NZ businesses, comparing the wordings from the FCIB-panel insurers (Delta Insurance, NZI, QBE, AIG, Zurich, Dual New Zealand) plus off-panel market comparators (Vero).
Every fact on this page is extracted from each insurer's published policy wording PDF — see the audit trail at the bottom for source documents, effective dates and SHA-256 hashes.
What is business liability insurance?
"Business liability insurance" is an umbrella term for the commercial covers that protect your business when a third party — a customer, an employee, a regulator, a director, or anyone in a contractual chain — brings a claim against you. NZ doesn't have a single "business liability" policy: instead the cover is split into specific products, each with its own wording, limit structure, and trigger basis.
The two foundational distinctions every NZ buyer needs to understand:
- Occurrence-basis vs claims-made trigger. Public liability and products liability are written on an occurrence basis (covers events during the policy period regardless of when the claim is later brought). Professional indemnity, D&O, management liability and cyber are claims-made (covers claims made and notified during the policy period for past acts, subject to a retroactive date). Get the trigger wrong and you can discover decade-old work isn't covered.
- Defence costs in or outside the limit of indemnity. On some wordings legal defence costs erode your limit (you pay settlement and lawyers from the same pool). On others, defence sits outside the limit. On a contested matter the difference can be material — long-running disputes burn through "in-limit" defence cost before any award is paid.
See the cross-insurer topics section below for verbatim wording extracts on each.
Cover types — 10 products on file
Each link goes to a dedicated product comparison page showing what every NZ commercial insurer's wording covers — limit options, defence-costs treatment, key exclusions, version on file, tier.
General liability
- Public liability — Public liability (sometimes "broadform" or "general liability") covers third-party bodily injury and property damage arising from your business activities.
- Products liability — Products liability covers third-party bodily injury / property damage caused by a product you supplied, manufactured, imported or installed.
Professional liability
- Professional indemnity — Professional indemnity covers your civil liability for claims arising from professional services.
Statutory / regulatory
- Statutory liability — Statutory liability covers fines and defence costs for unintentional breaches of NZ statutes (HSWA, Privacy Act, RMA, Fair Trading Act).
- Employers liability — NZ's Accident Compensation Act bars most employer claims for accidental workplace injury — ACC absorbs them.
Management liability
- Directors & officers — D&O insurance protects individual directors and officers from personal liability for wrongful acts in their corporate capacity.
- Management liability — Management liability is a packaged cover for private companies bundling D&O, employment practices liability, statutory liability, tax investigation and crime into a single policy.
- Association liability — Association liability covers the boards of incorporated societies, NFPs, industry bodies, sports clubs and body corporates.
Cyber / technology
- Cyber liability — Cyber liability covers both first-party costs (incident response, forensic, notification, business interruption, ransom) and third-party liability (privacy claims, regulator fines).
Combined packages
- Combined liability package — Most NZ commercial insurers offer a combined liability package (NZI LiabilityOne, Delta GEL Package, Vero Combined Broadform).
NZ commercial insurers (7)
Six insurers sit on the FCIB panel — these are the underwriters First Commercial Insurance Brokers can directly place your cover with. Off-panel insurers are shown for wording comparison context only.
FCIB panel (6)
- Delta Insurance — Delta Insurance New Zealand Limited · 4 of 5 products with wording on file
- NZI — IAG New Zealand Limited (NZI brand) · 3 of 3 products with wording on file
- QBE — QBE Insurance (Australia) Limited (NZ branch) · 4 of 4 products with wording on file
- AIG — AIG Insurance New Zealand Limited · 1 of 1 products with wording on file
- Zurich — Zurich Australian Insurance Limited (NZ branch) · 4 of 4 products with wording on file
- Dual New Zealand — Dual New Zealand Limited · 3 of 3 products with wording on file
Off-panel — market comparators (1)
- Vero — Vero Insurance New Zealand Limited · 2 of 2 products with wording on file · FCIB cannot place with this insurer
Cross-insurer topics (9)
Same coverage question, every insurer's answer side by side — sourced verbatim from each wording.
- Occurrence vs claims-made
Public / general liability wordings in NZ are written on an occurrence basis (covers events during the policy period regardless of when claimed).
- Retroactive date and run-off
On claims-made policies, the retroactive date sets the earliest "act" the insurer will pick up.
- Defence costs in/out of limit
On some wordings, defence costs erode the limit of indemnity (you pay legal costs out of the same pool that pays the settlement).
- Fines insurability by Act
NZ statutes differ on whether the fine itself can be insured.
- ACC interaction
NZ's Accident Compensation Act bars most employee claims for accidental workplace injury — ACC absorbs them.
- D&O Side A/B/C
D&O policies divide cover into Side A (non-indemnifiable loss — directors personally), Side B (company reimbursement for indemnified loss), and Side C (entity securities cover for the company itself).
- Management liability modules
Management liability bundles D&O + employment practices + statutory + tax investigation + crime into one policy for private companies.
- Ransomware payment handling
Most NZ cyber wordings cover incident response, forensic and BI costs from a ransomware attack.
- Territory and jurisdiction
NZ commercial liability wordings differ on territory (where the act giving rise to the claim can occur — usually NZ + worldwide excluding USA/Canada) and jurisdiction (where a claim can be brought against you — usually NZ courts only).
Buyer scenarios (12)
Persona-driven discovery — pick the situation closest to yours and see which covers matter, what to look for in the wording, and what to watch out for.
Public liability for the one-truck plumber, sparkie, builder or painter — what to look for in the wording.
Professional indemnity for management, IT, HR, or specialist consultants — the retroactive date is everything.
Outage, breach, breach-of-contract — the two policies that protect a NZ tech company.
Residential and commercial builders — site liability, HSWA defence, sub-contractor exposure.
Slip-and-fall, food poisoning, customer property damage — what hospitality wording looks like.
Personal protection for directors and officers — Side A, Side B, Side C and where private NZ companies fit.
Physios, psychologists, dietitians and others — entity PI vs clinical PI, and what your data triggers.
Civil, structural, geotech — design errors that surface 5+ years later need run-off you can rely on.
When your product harms a customer, who pays? Importers carry the legal weight in NZ.
Volunteer boards run real risk. Association Liability is the NFP equivalent of D&O.
Commercial landlord public liability — where the building wording stops and your responsibility starts.
Bringing goods into NZ makes you legally responsible — territory clauses decide if you're covered for export claims too.
How we source this data
Every fact on this site is extracted from a published insurer policy wording PDF. We download the source PDF, compute a SHA-256 hash, extract the effective date from the cover page or filename, convert the wording to structured Markdown via a vision-LLM pipeline, and store everything in a shared NZ insurance-data Supabase database. Each fact is rendered with its source URL, effective date, ingest timestamp and hash for audit.
We enforce a 24-month freshness cap on user-facing wording facts — anything older than that is surfaced as "previous version archived" with a "request the latest from the insurer via FCIB" CTA, never as current cover. The diff layer retains older versions so we can show what's changed over time.
For AI agents: every page has a machine-readable companion at
/api/insurer/{slug}/facts.json,
/api/product/{insurer}/{product}/facts.json,
/api/topic/{slug}/summary.md,
and a JSON-RPC MCP server at /mcp
(anonymous, rate-limited, 6 tools).