The Best Photography Insurance of 2024

Photography insurance is coverage specifically designed to protect photographers and videographers from a big financial loss, typically via either damage to their equipment or due to a lawsuit. The right insurance coverage can protect your business (or you personally, depending on your business formation) from things such as breach of contract, damaged property, professional liability, or workers' compensation for businesses with employees.

As a photographer, you can choose to get insurance coverage in two ways, either choosing à la carte the exact coverage you need, or you can choose to get a business owner's policy (BOP) that covers most small business needs. Using a BOP is typically more affordable for businesses that don’t have a lot of potential liability, including freelancers or hobbyist photographers. Here are the typical types of coverage that can be included in the term “photography insurance,” but the type you need varies by the size of your business: 

• General Liability Insurance: This is a generic coverage that can include several things, depending on your policy, such as client injuries or some property damage.
• Property Insurance: This is a more comprehensive coverage option to protect your important equipment. Typically this isn’t needed unless you have a larger business with a lot of equipment and are completing high-risk jobs. 
• Business Owner’s Policy: Combines both general liability and property coverage in a more affordable package.
• Professional Liability Insurance: Often called “errors and omissions” insurance, this protects you from potential liability you incur with the delivery of your work performance. 

Insurance coverage will help most photographers in most of the situations they might encounter. However, insurance is never going to cover everything. For photographers, that means that if you commit fraud or serious negligence, you may not be covered. An example of fraud is if a photographer sold services, collected money from their client, failed to deliver, and didn’t refund the money. Negligence is a bit tougher to prove but essentially means that the photographer failed to do something that they should have done, which caused the problem. Negligence is carved out of insurance policies in different ways, so you should read the fine print. 

Your photographer's insurance policy might not cover specific types of events or activities. So if you’re into high-risk photography that could impact the safety of your property, like marine or drone photography, then you’ll need to be sure this is covered in your policy. This could require you to have a totally different coverage type, like inland marine or drone insurance, each carrying an additional cost.

The costs of photography insurance vary by state and the amount of coverage you need. You can get general liability insurance for as little as $59 to cover a single event, like a wedding, all the way up to paying several hundred dollars per month for a larger business. Below are some of the items that could impact your total costs: 

• The value of your equipment
• Company revenue, or freelancing revenue from the photography services you offer
• Photography services offered
• Where your business is located
• How many employees you have, if any
• What coverage and options you select