What Kind of Liability Insurance Do I Need if I Own a Salon Suite?

Salon suites are the new and improved way to own and operate your own salon space without all the risk and overhead of owning an entire building. That’s because salon suites work as a sort of upscale mini salon operating out of a larger salon space. This let’s owners get into the business of salon ownership with a relatively low cost of entry.

Even with this new way to offer beauty services, owners can still be held liable should an accident or injury occur within or around their space. Salon suite owners need to be especially mindful of what kinds of liability insurance are needed to provide adequate protection from the new risks facing the industry.

Types of Liability Insurance Salon Suite Owners Need to Have Now

Whenever you start looking at salon suite liability insurance, you’ll see a lot of the same types of liability coverages being offered. The two most common forms of liability insurance includes general liability coverage and professional liability coverage. The third most common liability coverage is product liability coverage.

With these three coverage types, a large portion of risks facing professionals are covered. We’ll cover each in a little more detail below:

General Liability Coverage: you’ll often hear general liability coverage referred to as “slip and fall insurance”. This is because slip and fall injuries are an all-too-common occurrence for business owners everywhere. Slip and falls are so common that OSHA even set up a whole training program to help prevent them. Unfortunately, a slip and fall is all it takes for a salon suite owner to suddenly face a lawsuit.

That’s where general liability coverage kicks in. For claims arising from injuries or property damage that happens to third-parties (that excludes yourself and the insurance company) on, or around, your place of business, you’re covered per the provisions of the policy. When a party decides their claim against you warrants a lawsuit, you’re covered there too with both claim costs and legal defense fees included up to the coverage limits.

Beauty Insurance Plus includes up to $2 million per occurrence and a $3 million individual annual aggregate in general liability coverage.

Professional Liability Coverage: professional liability coverage is also known as “malpractice insurance”. Malpractice literally means “bad practice” and is applied to accidents that occur as a result of the services you provide. For example, waxing burns and skin tears are some of the most common types of injuries that occur on clients in salons. If you injure a client during a session, they may require medical treatment and may eventually decide to sue you to recover their costs. Even for salon suite owners that have years and years of experience in beauty and that practice a very safe service routine, accidents can and do still happen everyday.

Professional liability insurance is a lifeline when an unfortunate event occurs. Even when someone’s claim against you is entirely frivolous, there can be litigation, which requires costly defense fees.

Helping salon suite owners practice with confidence is what we do best. With Beauty Insurance Plus, you receive all the way up to $2 million per occurrence with a $3 million individual annual aggregate in professional liability coverage.

Product Liability Coverage: your salon suite no doubt uses an absolute plethora of different hair, skin, and make up products, dyes, and more. With any of the products you use, all it takes it takes is an adverse allergic reaction for a claim to be brought. If an allergic reaction is severe, it can lead to anaphylaxis, a potentially life-threatening condition.

Cosmetologists and estheticians know any sort of allergic reaction should be taken seriously. Health questionnaires and mitigation techniques like hair color allergy tests help to lessen the likelihood of a claim but there still exists a lot of risk simply for the sheer amount of different products needed to perform an array of beauty treatments.

To effectively cover salon suite owners from risks related to the products they use, Beauty Insurance Plus includes all the way up to $2 million in product liability coverage.

There are many additional risks that require some level of protection in order to provide the best overall coverage for salon suite owners operating today. This means that a salon suite liability policy should actually cover more than just liabilities. Other loss events can make it difficult if not impossible to continue to operate. Without insurance, these costs would come out-of-pocket.

Next, we’ll jump into additional ways to build up crucial protections for yourself as a successful salon suite owner.

Additional Protection For Your Salon Suite

As we’ve discussed, your salon suite faces many different forms of risk. While the liability insurance side covers a lot of the risks from injuries and property damage that can occur, there’s other losses that require adequate coverage. Additional safeguards help to provide a safety net whenever a loss event necessitates a claim.

As you’re looking over your salon suite liability insurance options, make sure to look for additional protections like:

Rental Damages Coverage: if you’re renting your salon suite space, any damages that occur while you’re occupying the space could be your responsibility to fix. Our plan includes all the way up $100,000 to help cover the cost of repairs needed to fix damages inside a rented salon space.
Identity Protection Plan: an online presence is needed to market yourself, do banking and other transactions, communicate, and a whole host of other necessary tasks. If your identity is compromised, it can take significant time and effort to restore it. That’s why we include all the way up to $25,000 worth of professional identity restoration services with our salon suite liability insurance plan.
Stolen/Damaged Equipment Protection: in the salon suite business, your tools are your livelihood. When your tools are stolen or damaged, this can greatly impede your ability to earn a living and yet a lot of insurance policies don’t provide protection for this. Beauty Insurance Plus knows just how vital your beauty tools are so include up to $1,000 with a $250 deductible to help you replace what was lost.

We’re often asked when should salon suite owners purchase insurance for the venture. The best way to minimize the risks faced and ensure long term success is to plan effectively. Whether that’s business planning, budgeting, or getting insurance, each of these crucial activities needs to be well thought out and employed as early as possible to provide the most benefit.

Adding Value to a Salon Suite Liability Insurance Policy

Looking for insurance if you own, or are planning to own, a salon suite is a great step towards helping ensure you have long term success in the industry. But even with great coverage at a great rate, your cosmetology and esthetician insurance still needs to bring a lot of value to the table.

So, whenever you’re looking at different kinds of liability insurance coverages, make sure to also note the program’s benefits package. Pro tip - do a little digging and see what the benefits plan actually entails as some plans are a little light. We include a host of different benefits to really make sure our members are getting something useful that further contributes to making their career in beauty a complete success.

A few of the many benefits included with a cosmetology insurance policy include:

Annual subscription to one of six leading beauty publications
Identity Protection Plan
Free Professional Website
Exclusive member discounts
Coverage for 350+ modalities

Covering hundreds of different modalities is a huge benefit built right into the fabric of our policy and what we believe insurance for beauty professionals should be. We don’t limit coverage to a select few styles but instead have hundreds of different beauty and wellness styles covered all under one encompassing policy.

How to Quickly Compare Insurance Plans

Now that you know what kinds of liability insurance, additional protections, and member benefits comprise a great insurance policy, you’re ready to start comparing options. But searching “best insurance for salons” lends a lot of different results. So how do you know if one plan really offers the level of protection your situation needs?

The best cosmetology and esthetician insurance plan for your situation is one that provides generous amounts of coverage for the types of risks present in your industry, provides additional benefits that help to produce value, and one that does all of this at a low annual rate.

At just $159 for an entire year of coverage for professionals, Beauty Insurance Plus stands as one of the very best combinations of value and coverage available today.

Get Salon Suite Liability Insurance Set-Up in Minutes

Your salon suite insurance provides everything you need to practice what you love with the full confidence that your policy is covering you every step of your career. Talk over the entire salon suite insurance policy and get all your questions answered.

Our agents can help guide you every step of the way.