Hands-on treatment, other people’s homes, and equipment you recommended.
Business insurance for occupational therapy practices: the hands-on, in-home and equipment exposures a practitioner policy does not reach.
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.
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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 occupational therapy businesses actually need.
Professional liability
Covers the advice, the drawing, the diagnosis. The work itself, rather than someone getting hurt on your premises.
Without it — Treatment and assessment decisions, including equipment you recommended that turned out to be wrong for the client.
Sexual abuse & molestation
Covers allegations of abuse by staff or volunteers. General liability usually excludes it outright, and any organization working with children, patients or vulnerable adults will be asked to carry it by name.
Without it — Hands-on treatment delivered one-to-one, frequently to children or adults with disabilities, is the allegation exposure funders require you to cover.
General liability
Third-party bodily injury and property damage. It is the line nearly every contract names by default.
Without it — Injuries in your clinic, and damage caused in a client’s home during an assessment or a modification.
Hired & non-owned auto
Covers vehicles the business does not own but its people drive on the job: rentals, and employees running errands in their own cars. Their personal auto policy will not cover a business trip, and the claim lands on the business. Pricing depends entirely on HOW it is bought: as an endorsement on a general liability policy we write, HNOA often costs a few hundred dollars; as a stand-alone (monoline) policy it runs $2,500 to $5,000, and association practitioner programs (CPH, CM&F and similar) generally cannot take the endorsement, so "add HNOA to my existing policy for $300-$800" is usually not a real option. A package carrying GL, professional liability and HNOA together is typically cheaper than the monoline.
Without it — Home-visiting therapists drive their own cars to clients all day.
Workers compensation
Required in almost every state the moment you have employees. Priced on payroll and class code, which is why the class code is worth arguing about.
Without it — Transfers and manual handling injure therapists more than any other cause.
Inland marine & equipment
Tools, equipment and property in transit. It picks up exactly where commercial property stops, which is the moment the item leaves the building.
Without it — Assessment kits, sensory equipment and loan stock travel with the therapist and leave the building.
Cyber & tech E&O
Breach response, ransomware and the notification costs that follow. Technology errors and omissions sits on the same policy and covers the software or service itself failing a client, which is the half most tech companies find out about too late.
Without it — Clinical records are health data whatever the size of the practice.
Kevin Kelsey
Founder | Principal Agent
Owned and ran a home health agency before insurance, which is where the allied health exposures were learned first-hand rather than from a rate manual: the vendor packets, the abuse and molestation requirement, staff driving their own cars to clients, and the he-said/she-said nature of a claim arising from one-to-one direct care where nobody else was in the room.
What the insurance company will ask about your occupational therapy business
We read 1 application the markets use for this kind of business and pulled out what they actually ask. Have these answers ready and a quote takes a day instead of a week, because nobody has to come back to you for the missing piece.
About the business
- What type of therapy or training services do you provide?
- Do you own or operate a facility where you provide these services?
How you operate
- Do you work under a physician's direction, or do clients come to you on their own?
- What percentage of your work is with people under age 18?
- What percentage of your work is in nursing homes or hospitals?
- Do you work with any celebrities, professional athletes, or other high-profile clients, and if so, what percentage of your business is that?
Safety and controls
- Do you have written policies for keeping patient records private and sharing information with other healthcare providers?
- Do you have written policies for checking the quality of care you provide, managing risks, and preventing infections?
- If you have a facility, are safety inspections done regularly?
- Do you get signed consent and liability waivers from all patients or their parents or guardians?
Services you offer
- Do any of your staff do blood tests or stress tests?
- Do you treat wounds or burns?
- Do you work with children under age three?
- If you provide occupational therapy, do you do driver rehabilitation?
- If you provide occupational therapy, do you require a doctor's approval before clients return to work?
Your history
- Do you have any claims or incidents from previous years?
Have these ready
- Your current or most recent insurance policy paperwork
- Your claims history from your current insurer for the last five years
- Your payroll records for the past year
- Your business revenue records for the past year
You answer what you can; a licensed agent fills the rest with you.
What our occupational therapy clients ask us.
Am I liable for equipment I recommended?
It is a professional liability question rather than a product one, and yes it can attach. Recommending a transfer aid, a wheelchair, a bathroom modification or a sensory tool is a clinical judgment, and a client injured using it may say the recommendation was wrong. This is one of the clearest examples of why the professional policy and the general liability policy are answering different questions.
Does home-based practice change my coverage?
It changes two things. The driving becomes a real exposure that needs hired and non-owned auto, and damage you cause inside a client’s home becomes a general liability claim rather than a premises one. Practices that moved from clinic to community rarely revisit the policy that was written for the clinic.
Do you write pediatric OT?
Yes, and it is worth flagging as pediatric rather than leaving it general. Working with children raises the abuse and molestation requirement and changes who is contracting you: school districts and regional centers rather than adult clinics, each with their own vendor packet.
What does a occupational therapy insurance application ask for?
The applications for occupational therapy businesses ask about 4 things above all: what type of therapy or training services do you provide; do you work under a physician's direction, or do clients come to you on their own; do you have written policies for keeping patient records private and sharing information with other healthcare providers; do any of your staff do blood tests or stress tests. Have your current or most recent insurance policy paperwork and your claims history from your current insurer for the last five years ready and a quote takes a day instead of a week.
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.