PI insurance guideline rate calculator — UK

A guideline range for UK professional indemnity premiums, built from Apex's own book of placements. It shows the middle-to-upper end of recent market outcomes for similar risks — deliberately conservative, before insurance premium tax. It is not a quote.

Where the data comes from

Apex arranges professional indemnity cover across 18 regulated and unregulated professions, from solicitors and accountants through surveyors, architects, engineers, IT consultants, management consultants and independent financial advisers. Every quote we obtain from an insurer — whether it converts into a placement or not — is logged into our market data table with the fee income, activities, limit and terms attached.

The guideline you see here is what that table produces once it is stripped of anything identifying, banded up by profession and fee income, and run through the same aggregation rules a compliance consultant would recognise: a minimum cell size of five records before a band publishes, and the top of each cell trimmed to remove single outlier risks. The result is not a market survey and it is not a comparison with any other broker's book — it is Apex's own recent placement history, presented in ranges.

Because it is our data, the range widens or narrows as the market moves. A hardening PI market for a particular profession shows up in the guideline within days; a softening in insurer appetite likewise. That is one reason the figure you see today may not match the figure a colleague sees next month, even for an apparently identical firm.

What the guideline doesn't tell you

Your work profile. Two accountants with the same fee income can pay very different premiums if one does audit and tax structuring and the other only handles owner-managed compliance. Two architects the same. The calculator uses profession and a higher-risk toggle; a real submission uses the detailed activity split that sits behind those.

Claims and prior notifications. Any circumstance notified in the last six years, whether or not it developed into a claim, changes how insurers price the risk. The claims toggle here applies a broad uplift; underwriters look at the facts of each notification, its reserve movement and whether it has been closed.

Jurisdiction and cross-border work. Work carried out for US or Canadian clients, or in restricted territories, is priced separately and often on separate wording. The calculator assumes UK-only work. If any part of your practice touches the US, expect the real quote to sit meaningfully above the guideline.

Building Safety Act 2022 exposure. Architects, engineers, surveyors and any professional whose work touches higher-risk buildings under the BSA 2022 face a specific underwriting overlay — extended limitation, contractor-designed work, cladding-adjacent activities. The guideline reflects an average across a book that includes some BSA-exposed risks and many that are not; a firm sitting squarely inside that exposure will not price at the guideline.

The Apex approach to quoting

A real quote is not an automated output. Once you complete the proposal or speak to a broker, Apex approaches the wholesale market or direct insurer channels on your behalf, presents your risk to underwriters who write your profession, and negotiates on cover, excess and premium. That process brings in nuances the calculator cannot — broker relationships, wording preferences, cross-subsidy across a placement, and the underwriter's own view of the current portfolio.

The upshot is that a firm whose calculator range shows £3,000 to £4,500 may end up placed at £2,600 because the underwriter has appetite for that profession that quarter and the broker has surfaced the right activity mix. The guideline is a starting point for expectation-setting, not the outcome.

Frequently asked questions