Covering up · moisture · adhesion
Liability insurance for a self-employed plasterer
A plasterer brings water and plaster into a house where people live. What goes wrong is almost always below the spot where you are standing: a floor, a window frame, a cabinet that was not pushed quite far enough away.
- Several insurers compared objectively
- 9.5 customer rating for a new policy
- AFM licence 12016589
- Personal 072 - 509 24 56, weekdays 9–17
Deze pagina in het Nederlands: Aansprakelijkheidsverzekering voor een zelfstandige stukadoor.
The calculator and the quote form below are in Dutch. Prefer to do this in English? Email info@finassverzekert. nl or call 072 - 509 24 56 and we will take it from there.
Work out for yourself what it would cost.
Enter your details; you will receive a proposal within one working day.
- We compare the offerings of several insurers
- An adviser checks whether the cover suits your activities
- We arrange the switch, including cancellation
A premium indication, not personal advice. Prefer to talk it through? Call 072 - 509 24 56.
In brief
A liability insurance for businesses pays for injury and damaged property of others. In plastering it is rarely about injury and almost always about the finishes around the work: a parquet floor with mortar splashes, a painting behind the plastic, a frame sanded through. That is exactly where the question arises whether what you covered up was at that moment in your in your care, because then the standard cover is not enough.
What you certainly will not be paid for is the plasterwork itself. Cracks, poor adhesion, a wall that is not flat or efflorescence are complaints about your performance. Putting right your own work is excluded on every AVB; going back to put it right is part of the trade. What is insurable is damage caused to other property in the process, such as a floor that warps from water leaking out of your machine.
Two things belong elsewhere. Your your own injury — a fall from the scaffold or from the mobile tower into the stairwell — is a question of income and is arranged with disability insurance. And a dispute about the final invoice with a client who does not pay because he is dissatisfied is not a liability matter but a debt collection matter.
This page deals with one situation. The full overview is on Compare public and employers' liability insurance (AVB).
What plastering runs into
Four situations that lead to a claim for a self-employed plasterer.
What you cover up is in your keeping
Floors, stairs, frames and furniture you mask off in order to work are property temporarily in your keeping. Many insurers regard those as care, custody and control and exclude damage to them, while that is precisely where most claims come from. Ask for express care, custody and control cover and watch the limit per event. Sometimes it is so low that a poured floor already falls outside it.
Cracks and adhesion: your work or the substrate
Plaster coming away from an untreated or too damp substrate is a different story from a wrong choice of mortar. Note at the start what you found: moisture readings, type of substrate, existing old layers. Without that record the assumption is that the fault lies with you, and then the complaint runs into the exclusion for defective work of your own in the right place.
Moisture left behind in the home
Fresh plaster layers bring litres of water into a house. Inadequate ventilation or heating too fast produces warped doors, mould on wallpaper and laminate coming loose. That consequential loss can be insured, but many policies contain an exclusion for gradually acting influences such as damp and mould. Give the client written drying and ventilation instructions and keep a copy.
Plaster in the drain
Rinsing buckets and machines in a sink or toilet leads to a blocked soil stack, and in a block of flats to a claim from several residents or from the VvE. The unblocking and repair costs are third-party property damage and covered in principle. Discharging plaster water into the sewer can also become an environmental matter, and it then belongs with environmental damage insurance.
What does your premium depend on?
- Turnover or days worked: the basis for calculating the premium
- Type of clients: private clients in occupied homes or new build through a contractor
- Care, custody and control cover included: included or not, and up to what amount per event
- Machine-applied or hand-applied work: spray work brings a different claims profile
- Working at height: facade rendering and use of scaffolding are weighed separately
- Excess per claim: a higher excess brings the premium down
Insurers weigh these details differently. That is where your saving is.
What is covered
| Situation | AVB | BAV |
|---|---|---|
| Your bucket of mortar falls in the communal stairwell and damages the floor covering | Yes | No |
| A drill hole for your corner bead strikes a water pipe in the wall | Yes | No |
| The worktop you had covered with plastic is scratched by your trowel | Provided that | No |
| The wall you plastered comes away over large areas after three months | No | No |
| You specify a plaster finish on a damp cellar wall and it all has to come off again | No | Yes |
| A wrongly stated drying time lets the painter start too early and he has to redo his work | No | Yes |
If you advise on substrate, system or scheduling, you are doing more than carrying out work and part of your risk moves to the right.
Frequently asked questions
This is what people ask us most.
The client thinks the wall is not smooth enough. Does the insurance pay for that?
No. A complaint about the quality of your plastering is about the contract and not about damage to a third party. Sanding, filling or plastering again is at your own expense. If the dispute leads to the final instalment being withheld or to a summons, that is a matter for legal expenses insurance, not for your liability policy.
I have spilled plaster on a parquet floor. Is that covered?
That depends on the care, custody and control provision. If the insurer regards the covered floor as property that was in your keeping, the loss is excluded unless you took care, custody and control cover. If the floor is in a room where you were not working, it is ordinary property damage and covered. This distinction is the main reason to have the conditions compared on this point.
I work with a hired spraying machine. Who pays for damage to it?
You do. A hired machine is property in your keeping, so damage to it falls under the care, custody and control exclusion in the AVB and the hire firm will simply charge you for it. If a hose bursts and mortar runs across the client's floor, that damage to the house is an insured property damage loss, provided the care, custody and control question does not arise there again.
How quickly do I have to report a claim?
As soon as you know of it, even if the client has not yet named an amount. Article 7:941 of the Dutch Civil Code requires you to inform the insurer in good time and to cooperate with the investigation. In an occupied house the mess is cleared up within a day; photographs taken at the time are therefore more important than the precise estimate you only hear weeks later.
Read more
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