Understanding claims-made Professional Indemnity policies

Professional Indemnity insurance is written on a claims-made basis. This means the policy that responds to a claim is the one in force at the time the claim is first made against you — not the policy that was in force when you did the work.

This is a critical distinction from occurrence-based cover, which is more common in other insurance lines. It means continuous, unbroken PI cover matters far more than it would under an occurrence-based policy.

If you let your PI cover lapse, even briefly, and a claim is made against you during that gap for work done years earlier, you may have no cover at all — regardless of whether you held a policy at the time the work was performed.

This is also why your retroactive date matters so much: it defines how far back your current policy will reach when a claim is eventually made.