Working from home? Might want to check your insurance coverage
Posted December 12, 2022 3:04 pm.
If you work from home and have home insurance, are you sure your policy has you covered?
As it turns out, some people may not be as protected as they thought.
This comes after someone brought a story to CityNews after finding out their home insurance policy didn’t cover them working from home. That forced the family to have to change insurance providers, resulting in an approximate $500 increase annually in costs.
Rob de Pruis, national director of consumer and industry relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada, says it’s worth reading the fine print to know what you’re actually covered for.
“Home insurance is designed to cover just that — your home, the items in your home, and your personal use of that home. It doesn’t cover your business. So any type of working from home or business, you want to make sure that you either have an additional endorsement that covers you while you’re working from home or in some cases you may actually need a business insurance policy, which is separate from your home insurance,” he explained.
An endorsement, de Pruis says, is something that can be added to an existing policy that would, in effect, change the type of coverage a customer has to a degree.
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He notes there are dozens of insurance providers in every province in Canada that do home insurance. Within that group, each provider may have what de Pruis refers to as “different risk appetites,” meaning they may want to cover only certain work-from-home business.
If you are working from home, de Pruis adds your coverage needs will differ from others.
“Someone who may be providing advice or information, you might need a specialty, professional liability coverage. If you have people who are coming to your home for pick ups and deliveries or just for your usual business, that’s a different type of a risk where these additional people coming to your home could slip and fall,” he told CityNews.
Considerations should also be made even if you’re working from home and not interacting with other people physically, de Pruis says. This is especially true if you have specialty equipment for that work.
“Really, at the end of the day is, what coverage do you need, and really under your home insurance, what coverage do you have or what coverage is available to you? It’s better to have that conversation before anything ever happens than finding out you may not have sufficient coverage if you have claim,” he said.
“Even if you do something once a month or occasionally, you want to have that conversation to make sure you do have proper protection.”
