You are insured as a practitioner. You are being sued as a supervisor.
The day you take on an RBT you acquire a supervision exposure your individual policy was never written for. We cover it, at the abuse and molestation limits districts and regional centers require.
Tell us the situation.
One licensed human replies the same business day — not five agents, not an auto-responder. If the policy you have is already the right one, we will tell you.
We use this to quote and service your insurance, and we do not sell it or pass it to lead networks. Privacy policy.
Send us what you have. We’ll tell you if it’s right.
Your current policy paperwork, a renewal notice, or nothing at all. A licensed agent reads it and replies the same business day.
What BCBA insurance actually covers.
Supervising RBTs
The moment you supervise a registered behavior technician, the claim that matters is not about your own session. It is about theirs, and it names you for the supervision. An individual professional liability policy insures the named practitioner's own acts. Whether it answers for the conduct of someone working under you is a specific question, and the usual answer is no.
Without it — The technician is defended by the agency's policy, or by nobody, and the supervising analyst is defended by a policy that was priced for one person seeing clients.
In-home, one to one, with a minor
ABA is delivered one to one, frequently in a family home, frequently with a child who may not be able to report reliably. That is the highest-scrutiny fact pattern in abuse and molestation underwriting, and it is why districts name ABA support providers explicitly — Santa Ana Unified does. California districts increasingly ask $3,000,000 per occurrence and $6,000,000 aggregate. Azusa Unified and Lawndale Elementary both do for work with children. Elsewhere $1M/$2M and $2M/$4M are the common asks. Read the aggregate as well as the per-occurrence number: it is the one that fails first.
Without it — The contract stalls at the certificate, and the exposure that the certificate is aimed at is genuinely the one that ends practices.
District and regional center contracts
Both ask for limits, and they do not ask for the same ones. A regional center vendorization packet and a district consultant packet routinely differ on abuse and molestation, on additional insured wording, and on whether professional liability must be occurrence or claims-made.
Without it — One certificate is built for both, and one of them refuses it.
What the regulators actually wrote down.
Louisiana Medicaid requires a licensed behavior analyst providing ABA to be "covered by professional liability insurance to limits of $1,000,000 per occurrence, $3,000,000 aggregate."
Louisiana Medicaid Services Manual, Chapter 4 Applied Behavior Analysis, Section 4.4 · checked 2026-10-04
Commercial behavioral health networks mostly ask less of non-physician clinicians. Optum’s behavioral credentialing plan requires "$1/$3 million for physicians and $1/$1 million for non-physician Clinicians, or in an amount or type as otherwise specified by applicable state law."
United Behavioral Health (Optum), 2026-2027 Credentialing Plan · checked 2026-10-04
What clients with BCBA insurance ask us.
My district wants $3M/$6M SAM and I have a $1M policy. What actually fixes that?
Not an umbrella, necessarily. A number of excess policies specifically exclude abuse and molestation, so you can buy one and move the certificate without moving the protection. The two things that genuinely fix it are a monoline abuse and molestation policy, which keeps its limit separate from general liability and umbrella, or a package rebuilt around the requirement. Stand-alone SAM typically runs $3,000 to $5,000; the package is often cheaper than the monoline policy on its own, which is why we quote both.
What will an underwriter ask me?
More than a limit and a certificate holder. Expect: what services you provide and to whom, whether work is one-to-one and where it happens, how staff and volunteers are screened and supervised, whether you work under another agency's supervision or independently, payroll or revenue even if small, and any claims or allegations history. A submission carrying those answers gets a quote; one carrying only "lowest cost, $1M, certificate holder" gets the questions back first.
Does an RBT need their own insurance?
An RBT who works only for an ABA agency is usually insured under the agency’s professional liability policy, and should ask to see that the policy names employees as insureds. An RBT who also takes private clients, or works as a 1099 contractor, is outside it for that work and needs an individual policy. The supervising BCBA needs to know which kind of RBT they are signing off on, because the claim will name the supervisor either way.
How much malpractice insurance do insurance panels want from a BCBA?
Usually $1,000,000 per claim and $1,000,000 aggregate. Optum’s behavioral network, Evernorth, Magellan and Premera publish $1M/$1M for non-physician clinicians, and Aetna defers to state requirements. Louisiana Medicaid asks ABA providers for $1M/$3M, and so do many school and regional center contracts, which is why most BCBAs end up carrying it.
I work for an ABA agency. Do I need my own BCBA policy?
Not for the work you do on the agency’s cases, if its policy covers employed clinicians. You do for anything outside it, such as private clients, consulting, a second agency or supervision you provide independently. And if the agency’s policy is claims-made, your protection for past sessions ends when you leave unless someone buys the tail. An individual policy costs little next to that gap.
Guides on BCBA insurance.
- Does my insurance meet the contract?A contract’s insurance clause is checked against the policy, not the certificate. The five things to compare, the shortfalls we see most on our calls, and what to send a broker so the answer comes back the same day.
- Do I need an LLC for business insurance?Sole proprietors can insure a business in their own name. What changes when you form an LLC, why the named insured must match your contracts, and why an LLC does not replace insurance.
- Malpractice limits for insurance panel credentialingMost insurance panels require $1M per claim and $1M aggregate from non-physician clinicians and $1M/$3M from physicians. We quote what Optum, Cigna’s Evernorth, Magellan, Premera, Aetna and UnitedHealthcare publish, what CAQH collects, and where the $3M figure really comes from.
Commercial insurance is 96% of what we do — it is not a department here, it is the whole business. Not ready to talk? The guides answer the questions this page raises in more depth. Already insured with us and need a certificate or a policy change? Ask the service team rather than starting a quote — it is faster and it goes to the people whose job it is. We also write home and auto, which is usually cheaper alongside the business policy than apart from it.
Handed a lease, a vendor packet or a client contract with insurance requirements? Paste it into the COI Requirements Decoder to see what each one means for your business, or read what the requirements mean.