GB Trade Insurance Price Index

Every row is a verbatim sentence read from the named source's own page through our fetch service on the date shown, hash-pinned to the stored read (the sha of the page's visible text; the raw page is mirrored to R2).

26 of the 39 named sources that could be read published a usable figure; 13 published none and are recorded as not published, never filled in; 3 could not be read (blocked, dead or unreachable) and count nowhere.

The headline figures (median, minimum, maximum, quartiles) are over ONE figure per source in GBP (a source's median where its page yielded several accepted sentences), so N counts sources, never sentences; 388 candidate sentence(s) were refused by a reviewer with the reason recorded.

The fuller derivation this dataset is chartered to grow into (not yet what the figures above are; they are each source's own published figure as read): The published 'from' price for every UK profession this venture covers, per insurer and per broker, quoted verbatim from that seller's own product page with the retrieval date - and then the thing no comparison site does: the SAME-TRADE SPREAD.

On 2026-09-10 photographer cover was advertised from £4.47 a month by Protectivity and from £5.05 by Simply Business; cleaning from £3.46 and £5.61; nail technician from £3.44 and £5.58; personal trainer / fitness instructor from £3.86 and £5.05.

The spread between the cheapest and dearest advertised price for the SAME trade, tracked monthly across the whole shelf, is a figure only a site that reads every seller can produce.

A second layer comes free from the same reads: Simply Business publishes its own customer count per trade on each page (4,900 photographers, 28,800 cleaners, 10,500 plumbing, heating and ventilation contractors, 7,500 window cleaners, 4,500 personal trainers, 45,100 consultants) - an insured-population estimate per profession, attributed to them as an observation, never presented as ours.

A third, which is a data-quality finding rather than a price: Rhino Trade prints its electrician rate as '£6,07 a month', a comma decimal that any automated comparison would read wrong.

The generic 'business insurance' question ('insurance for business', 'average business insurance cost uk') is the same shelf read one level up: each seller's HEADLINE small-business from-price together with the population the seller says it is stated over - Simply Business 'from £5.40' where '10% of customers paid £64.78 or less annually between 1st Jan - 30th Jun 2026', AXA 'from £7* a month' where '10% of our customers paid this or less between April and June 2026', Markel 'from £5 a month' for a £1m public liability policy for a marketing consultant, Clear Business 'from £5.64' for up to £2m of public liability.

So the 'average business insurance cost' answer is the distribution of the per-trade from-prices across the whole shelf beside the sellers' own stated tenth percentiles - never a single invented average, which is exactly what the page argues does not exist.

388 candidate sentences on these pages were refused by a reviewer; each refusal and its reason is recorded in the review ledger.