Definition
A photographer steps back during a wedding reception and drops a lighting stand on a guest's shoulder.
A developer runs a migration on a Friday evening and wipes out the client's orders table. In both cases the next question is the same, and it is not a legal one: who pays?
Professional liability insurance, known in France as responsabilité civile professionnelle or RC pro, is the contract that answers on your behalf.
It compensates the damage you cause to a third party in the course of your activity: bodily injury, physical damage to property, and financial loss, meaning the money a client loses even when nothing has been broken.
It covers your own acts, those of any employees, those of your subcontractors where the policy says so, and those of your equipment.
It insures the harm you do to others, not what happens to you. Being a Micro-entrepreneur changes nothing here: the status creates no insurance duty, and exempts you from none.
Who is actually required to have it
The activity decides, never the legal form of the business.
Professional liability cover is compulsory for regulated activities: legal professions such as avocats (lawyers), health professions such as nurses, estate agents, travel agents, insurance and credit intermediaries, chartered accountants, sports instructors.
Construction falls under a separate duty, the Ten-year building warranty (garantie décennale). The principle and the cases are set out on the official page on micro-entrepreneur insurance.
For everything else, development, design, copywriting, consulting, training, crafts outside construction, no law requires professional liability cover.
That is true, and it is rarely put that plainly.
The obligation simply comes back through another door, the contract: agencies, large accounts, public bodies and most platforms ask for the attestation (certificate of insurance) before signing, and a public tender almost always requires one.
Where insurance is compulsory for your trade, article 22-2 of the law of 5 July 1996 goes further: your devis (quotations) and factures (invoices) must show your insurer's name and contact details, and the geographical scope of the contract.
A certificate only covers the activities declared to the insurer, exactly as they are written on it.
The graphic designer who starts reselling hardware, the trainer who starts hosting websites: the certificate stays valid, the cover does not follow. The second blind spot is timing.
A client can claim long after delivery, and many policies only respond if the claim arrives while the contract is running, extended by what is called the période subséquente (run-off period).
Cancelling when you close the business can therefore leave a gap: the length of that period is in the policy wording, to be read before signing.
What it really costs under the micro scheme
You will find no price on this page: a premium depends on the trade, the declared turnover, the cover limits and the excess, and a figure copied from a comparison site is only true for the policy it sells.
What can be calculated is what the micro scheme does with that expense. The answer surprises people.
Yanis collects 24,000 € in 2026 from a non-regulated liberal activity: his income falls under the BNC (bénéfices non commerciaux, non-commercial profits), and he does not belong to the Cipav, the fund reserved for regulated liberal professions.
His Social contributions are calculated at an overall rate of 25.6% since 1 January 2026, that is 6,144 € for the year.
That rate does not cover everything: the vocational training contribution comes on top, so does the chamber levy for a trader or a craftsman, and income tax is still to be paid.
On the tax side, the 34% Standard allowance applying to BNC income in 2026, set by article 102 ter of the tax code, brings taxable profit down to 15,840 €.
Now take out a liability policy.
Neither figure moves by a single euro. The allowance replaces your actual costs, all of them: under the micro scheme an insurance premium is deducted from nothing.
It comes out of what is left once contributions are paid and tax is worked out, whereas a business under the régime réel (actual-profit scheme) books it as an expense.
This is not an argument against insuring yourself, it is the reason to choose a policy on its cover limits per claim and per year rather than on the monthly instalment on display.
Not to be confused with its three neighbours
The ten-year building warranty is not an add-on to professional liability: it is a separate compulsory cover for anyone building or renovating, it has to be taken out before the site opens, and liability cover alone never replaces it.
The second neighbour is Business package insurance, which protects your own assets, the premises, the equipment, the stock: it often includes liability cover, but it answers a different risk, fire or burglary rather than fault.
The third is Legal expenses insurance, which pays lawyers and court costs, and never pays the compensation owed to the client.
Then comes the most expensive confusion of all, the one with the split of estates.
Since 15 May 2022 your Professional assets have been separated automatically from your personal ones, and many people conclude that they are covered.
The opposite is true: damage caused to a client becomes a business debt, and that debt is paid precisely out of the professional estate, meaning the laptop, the vehicle, the tools and the business account.
Splitting your estates puts your home out of reach, not your means of earning a living: insurance is what pays instead of the owner.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need liability cover to register a micro-enterprise?
No, unless the activity is regulated.
The Guichet unique (single business formalities window) asks for no certificate for an unregulated activity, and registration goes through without insurance.
Where the duty exists it comes from the trade itself, and it is checked before the first client, not when the file is submitted.
Does my home insurance cover me if I work from home?
No.
A multirisque habitation (home) policy excludes professional activity: neither the client received in your living room, nor the equipment used to produce, nor a loss starting from that equipment is covered.
Telling your home insurer is a minimum, and it still does not replace professional liability cover.
A client asks for my certificate: what should be checked before sending it?
Four things: the validity period, the list of insured activities, the cover limits per claim and per year, and the territorial scope.
A client based outside the European Union often falls outside the covered area, and that is settled before signature, never after the dispute.
Does liability cover pay for a late delivery?
Rarely. Delays, contractual penalties and redoing poor work free of charge belong to your commercial commitments, not to civil liability.
What the policy targets is damage caused by a fault, not the price of work you owe the client in any case.