What Gear Insurance Actually Costs Photographers

Photo and video businesses pay $519 a year on average for equipment coverage - $43 a month - according to Insureon’s 2026 book of business. Talk to photographers at any wedding fair and a good number of them are carrying $10,000 to $20,000 of gear in a rolling case with nothing behind it but “I’ve been careful so far.” That’s not frugality. It’s a bet that a stolen bag or a dropped body between ceremony and reception never lands on your calendar, and the odds don’t actually favor you over a full career of shoots.

Insurance for a photography business isn’t one policy, and treating it as a vague “should probably get around to that” line item is how it stays unbudgeted for years. It’s two specific coverages that do two different jobs, both priced narrowly enough to put a real number on.

General liability covers other people, not your gear

General liability (GL) pays out when your business causes injury or property damage to someone else - a guest trips over your light stand, a rented reflector tips a drink onto a venue’s antique table, a stray sandbag dents a client’s car in the parking lot. It’s also, in practice, not optional the moment you book venues: most reception halls, hotels and increasingly even outdoor parks require a certificate of insurance naming them as additional insured before they’ll let you set up at all. No COI, no access, no matter how good your portfolio is.

The pricing on GL is tight enough to plan around. The median photography business pays around $17 a month - about $200 a year - for a standard policy, with the broader average nearer $29 a month ($350 a year) once claims history and coverage limits push some policies higher. Across Insureon’s photography and video book, 90% of buyers pay under $50 a month, and over a third pay $25 or less. For a solo shooter with a clean claims history, this is a two-hundred-to-four-hundred-dollar annual number, not a mystery.

Equipment coverage protects the one thing your business can’t run without

General liability doesn’t touch your cameras. For that you need inland marine insurance - the property-insurance category built for equipment that moves around and gets used off-premises, which describes a camera bag on literally every job you shoot. It covers theft, drops, water damage and the stolen-from-the-car scenario that homeowner’s or renter’s policies routinely exclude or cap absurdly low.

The average photo and video business pays that $43-a-month, $519-a-year figure for equipment coverage, but the real number for you depends on what you’re insuring: Insureon’s data shows a documented range of $200 to $2,500 a year, scaling with the total declared value of the gear on the policy. Some insurers price it in discrete chunks instead of a blanket number - one common option covers $5,000 per item up to a $30,000 aggregate for about $19.75 a month, which is a reasonable fit for a two-body, three-lens working kit. As a rough add-on to an existing base policy, equipment coverage commonly runs $10 to $30 a month before you scale up for a full professional kit or added drone/lighting gear.

If you want everything in one policy instead of juggling two providers, a bundled business owner’s policy - general liability plus commercial property/equipment coverage in one bundle - averages $47 a month, or $570 a year, across photography and video businesses, per Insureon’s 2026 data. That’s the option worth pricing out once you’re shooting full time, carrying a second shooter, or renting out gear to others, since a single renewal date is one less thing to track.

Why this belongs in the cost-of-doing-business number, not a “someday” list

The mistake isn’t skipping insurance because it feels expensive. It’s leaving it out of the math entirely, so the day rate you quote was never built to cover it in the first place - the same blind spot we walked through with quarterly taxes: a real cost doesn’t stop being real just because nobody invoiced you for it monthly.

Work it the same way you’d work any other annual expense that only shows up once a year. Say you’re running GL at $29 a month and equipment coverage at $43 a month for a $15,000 kit - $72 a month, $864 a year. Shoot 25 paid weddings a year and that’s $34.56 of insurance sitting inside every single booking whether you’ve priced for it or not. Run that annual figure through the cost of doing business calculator alongside your other fixed costs, and it folds into the day rate the calculator gives you back - the number moves a little, and then it’s covered instead of quietly eaten out of your margin every time a card corrupts or a stand tips over.

It’s worth pricing gear insurance at the same time you’re weighing a gear purchase, too. Every lens you buy adds to the declared value your equipment policy is covering - a $2,799 lens doesn’t just need to earn back its purchase price, it also nudges your annual premium up a notch, and that belongs in the breakeven math along with everything else.

The number that actually matters

$864 a year sounds like a lot until you compare it to the alternative: replacing a stolen $15,000 kit out of pocket mid-season, with bookings already on the calendar and no coverage to lean on while you rebuild it. Insurance doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything right up until the one year it does everything. Price it once, put the annual total into your CODB number, and it stops being a decision you have to remember to make every renewal.

If line-item numbers like this are useful to you as an ongoing habit, they show up occasionally in our field-notes emails.