Does employing door staff make my insurance cheaper or dearer?
Usually dearer, which surprises most operators. Security tells an underwriter you have a crowd that needs managing, and it introduces your own employees as potential defendants in an assault claim. That is not an argument for removing it — it is an argument for written policies and records that show the door is run properly.
Tell us the situation.
A licensed human replies the same business day — not an auto-responder, and not five producers calling at once. We shop it across our carriers and tell you if the policy you already have is the right one.
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What this means for you
- IT SIGNALS THE CROWD. Underwriters read a door team as a statement about who is coming in and what happens when they do. A quiet neighbourhood bar does not need one, so a venue that has one is telling them something about itself before anyone reads a word of the application.
- YOUR OWN STAFF BECOME DEFENDANTS. An ejection that goes wrong is an assault and battery claim against your business, brought by your customer, arising from your employee. This is precisely the coverage most often sublimited well below the policy limit, so it is worth reading that number first.
- IN-HOUSE VERSUS CONTRACTED CHANGES THE ANSWER. A contracted firm carrying its own coverage, naming you as additional insured, with a written agreement, shifts part of the exposure. In-house staff on your payroll do not shift any of it. Which you use is a real underwriting fact rather than an administrative detail.
- IF YOU CONTRACT, GET THE CERTIFICATE AND READ IT. A security firm whose own assault and battery cover is excluded or sublimited to nothing is not transferring the risk you think you transferred. This is the single most common gap we find on venue accounts.
- WRITTEN POLICIES ARE THE LEVER. Use of force, refusal of service, ejection procedure, incident logging, camera retention, training records. These are what move an underwriter, and they cost time rather than money.
- LOG EVERY INCIDENT, INCLUDING THE ONES THAT WENT FINE. An incident log showing thirty refusals and two ejections handled by the book is evidence of a well-run door. No log at all leaves the underwriter to imagine what your door is like.
Related questions
- Our security is contracted. Are we still exposed?
- Partly, and less than with in-house staff. A plaintiff will typically name both the venue and the security firm, so what matters is whether the firm carries real assault and battery cover, whether you are an additional insured on it, and what the written agreement says about indemnity. Get the certificate, check the assault and battery sublimit specifically rather than the general liability limit, and keep the agreement somewhere you can find it.
- Should we take the security off to save money?
- Almost never. If the venue needs a door team it needs one, and an incident that a trained door would have prevented costs far more than the rating did. The saving is in running the door well and being able to prove it, not in removing it.
- How security operations are underwritten
- So can you actually place a venue like mine?
- Usually, yes — and the ones we cannot place quickly are almost always the ones where the submission arrived as a declarations page and a renewal date. This class is placed on operating detail: the floor plan, the hours you actually keep as opposed to the ones your licence permits, the revenue split, the training records, the written policies, and an explanation attached to every claim. Venues that look identical on an application place very differently once that detail is in front of an underwriter who writes the class.
- The full underwriting list, in order
Need this handled?
We do the filings, and we place the accounts other brokers decline — lapsed authority, claims history, new ventures. Tell us the situation and a licensed human replies the same business day.
Written by the licensed brokers at Boring Insurance. Last updated 2026-08-22. See all guides.