Reviewed by Matthew Bartlett, Director · Last reviewed 8 July 2026
Architects' PI renewal has moved from a routine annual exercise to a live regulatory pressure point since the Building Safety Act 2022 came into force. The Architects Registration Board's Standard 8 obliges every registered architect in practice to hold adequate and appropriate PI cover. Adequacy is not defined by a fixed number; it is defined by the risk profile of the practice, the projects on the books, and the historical exposure that will not close for years. Renewal is when that judgement is tested.
Ten to twelve weeks before the renewal date is now the working position for any practice with residential work, high-rise exposure, or a project involving building-safety review. For smaller practices with domestic-only work the eight-week window is workable. The reason for the earlier start is the post-BSA underwriting environment. Insurers have tightened their appetite for cladding, fire-safety and high-rise residential work, and several have withdrawn from the segment entirely. Placing the account with an insurer that still writes the risk profile properly takes longer than it used to, and rushing the submission narrows the panel.
Under section 3 of the Insurance Act 2015 the practice owes a duty of fair presentation. The proposal will ask for a fee-income split by project type — residential, mixed-use, commercial, healthcare, education, listed buildings — and the individual project list for the top ten to twenty jobs by value. It will ask for claims and notified circumstances over the last five to ten years, changes in principals or company structure, and details of every project that touches building safety, cladding, structural stability, or fire compartmentation. Notified circumstances must go in even where no claim has followed. RIBA-Chartered practice status is a data point, not a substitute for the underlying disclosures.
Section 135 of the Building Safety Act 2022 extended the Defective Premises Act limitation period to 30 years retrospectively for dwellings completed before 28 June 2022 and 15 years prospectively. That is a materially different long-tail liability profile from the six-year contractual position most partners internalised at university. The renewal proposal will ask about historical residential work back further than the practice used to hold data for. Fire-safety exclusions, cladding exclusions and asbestos exclusions have been standard in the residential segment for several years now, and their scope varies significantly between insurers. Net-contribution clauses in appointments protect against joint-and-several exposure but insurers view them differently. Run-off cover for a practice that is dissolving needs a plan — six years is the ARB-implied minimum in most guidance, but the BSA long-tail argues for longer.
95% of Apex clients renew with Apex. The number reflects the way the work is done rather than a promise about the year ahead. A practice whose broker treats renewal as re-underwriting — reading the appointments, understanding what has changed in the pipeline, disclosing the historical position fairly, and working the panel — gets an outcome that matches the risk. A practice whose broker asks the incumbent for a quote and passes it on has forfeited the review. Retention follows the process, not the other way round.
ARB Standard 8 requires adequate cover; it does not set a number. Adequacy for a practice with residential work completed in the last thirty years is a materially different judgement from adequacy for a practice with commercial-only work in the last six. Section 135 of the Building Safety Act 2022 rewrote the long-tail calculation, and limits set at pre-BSA levels look thin against the extended limitation period. The right limit review at renewal considers the largest project by contract value, the residential exposure across the historical book, the aggregate cover position against the each-and-every position, and the run-off implications if the practice were to close. It is a partner-level conversation that benefits from an early start, because moving limit at the last minute narrows the panel further.
One named broker owns the account and the file is worked from ten weeks out. Every insurer with genuine appetite for architects' risk on our panel is approached, and the submission is drafted with the practice rather than sent as a proposal form to complete. Fire-safety, cladding and BSA-adjacent exposures are set out honestly rather than minimised, because a minimised presentation reads worse to an underwriter than a fair one. Wording differences — fire-safety exclusions, cladding exclusions, net-contribution treatment, defence-costs handling, retroactive dates, aggregate versus each-and-every claim — are set out in plain English. A single direct