Business income insurance.

How much business income coverage you carry comes from your own numbers: the net income the business earns in a month, the expenses that keep coming while the doors are closed, and how many months a rebuild would take. A shop that clears a steady monthly profit and pays rent, payroll, and a loan would add those together and multiply by the rebuild time. A rule of thumb gets this wrong in both directions. What changes the answer is the length of the rebuild, because a building that takes a year to restore calls for a limit and a restoration period that reach that far, so we set the limit from your statements and the likely rebuild time.

The waiting period is the stretch right after the loss when business income pays nothing. It works like a deductible measured in days instead of dollars. If a fire closes the shop on a Monday, the policy starts counting from the fire, and income lost during the first days of the shutdown is yours to absorb. After that, the restoration period begins and the payments start. Most policies carry a short waiting period, and some let you buy it down. What changes the answer is the form and the carrier, so we point out the waiting period on the quote before you bind and not after the fire.

How long business income pays is set by the period of restoration. It runs from the end of the waiting period until the business could reasonably be repaired and reopened, and many policies add a set window after reopening to let revenue recover. A shop fire with a four month rebuild pays for the four months and then the extended window. It does not run until the business feels normal again, and it does not run past the policy’s own cap on months. What changes the answer is the restoration period you buy and how long a rebuild really takes for your building, which is why we ask about both.

A power outage is generally not covered by business income on its own. The standard trigger is physical damage to your own building from a covered cause, and a utility failure off your property is not that. Utility service interruption coverage is a separate endorsement that can add it, usually with its own waiting period and sometimes limited to certain utilities. A restaurant that loses a week of trade to a downed transmission line is the common case. What changes the answer is whether the endorsement is on your policy and what caused the outage, so we read the triggers with you before storm season, not during it.

If your supplier is the one who burns down, business income only responds if the policy carries a dependent property endorsement. The base coverage is triggered by damage at your own location, so a shutdown caused by a fire across the state at your only supplier falls outside it. The endorsement names the suppliers or customers the business depends on, or covers them as a group, and pays for the income lost while they recover. A fabricator that relies on one steel supplier is the usual example. What changes the answer is whether the endorsement was added and who is listed on it, so we ask who you cannot run without.

Business income is usually part of the property policy rather than a separate one. It is written as a coverage inside the commercial property policy or the business owner’s policy, triggered by the same covered loss to the same building. A shop fire produces one claim with two parts: the property side rebuilds and replaces, and the business income side carries payroll and rent until the doors reopen. It can be written on its own when the situation calls for it, but that is rare. What changes the answer is how the property is insured in the first place, since business income follows the policy that covers the building.