# Professional liability insurance



## teammike (Mar 22, 2011)

Does anyone have any idea how much professional liability insurance costs of an individual, not part of a firm? Just curious.


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## ironman (Apr 6, 2011)

For my state I had a co worker that was a contractor and the liability insurance was more expensive than his errors and ommissions insurance, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5k/year but that was a few years ago. If you are going out as a contractor you need to figure thoes expences into your bill rate. As a pure contractor that has all his own insurance and equipment you should be billing out at around 120$/hr becaseu not only do you have insurance but computers, expensive software licences, office, office equ, individual medical insurance (unless your spouse has it), etc. If you cant get that bill rate then I would say just be an employee somewhere.

There are alot of costs to factor in so you need to off set, so your profit is about 80$/hr, I would normally say DOE but if you are going to be a contractor you need at least a PE and 10-15 years experience and 15 years experinece is about 60-80$/hr depending on engineering disipline and what you are doing. I guess for simple civil engineering tasks it could be around 40$/hr for 10-15 years.


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## udpolo15 (Apr 7, 2011)

teammike said:


> Does anyone have any idea how much professional liability insurance costs of an individual, not part of a firm? Just curious.


I have no idea, but it will vary (probably significantly) based on discipline, type of projects, size of projects, annual revenue, etc.


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## picusld (Apr 7, 2011)

udpolo15 said:


> teammike said:
> 
> 
> > Does anyone have any idea how much professional liability insurance costs of an individual, not part of a firm? Just curious.
> ...


It is variable based on the amount of business that you do.

I know traffic engineers pay a pretty high rate.


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## Road Guy (Apr 11, 2011)

why would traffic engineers pay a high rate?

Most people dont even consider that "real engineering" its more like software manipulation...

What is odd is that no one can ever answer this question!


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## ALBin517 (Apr 13, 2011)

I talked with a semi-retired PE last year and he claimed to pay insurance by the use.

He said he'd call his agent and describe the scope of the project and what coverage he needed, then the agent would tell him the cost to cover the project in question.


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