The Ultimate Massage Therapy Insurance Guide
The wide world of massage therapy insurance can indeed be daunting. If you are searching through the internet and clicking around at a bunch of sites, the sheer number of choices in front of you can be overwhelming. That’s why we’ve created this in-depth guide focused solely on massage therapy insurance. We’ll look at how Massage Magazine Insurance Plus designed this plan just for massage professionals and what details matter when stacking up insurance plans side-by-side.
When you’re through, we hope you have everything you need to make the best decision for your unique massage career. If you’d still like to talk things over, contact our team and we’ll gladly walk you through the entire plan.
Key Takeaways
Coverage: Massage therapist insurance needs to cover the three main types of liabilities, or risks, facing massage professionals - general liability, professional liability, and product liability.
Affordability: Massage therapy insurance should provide a great wall of coverage, as well as affordability—simultaneously.
Details Matter: Occurrence form coverage is the industry preferred type for massage insurance plans. It can literally mean the difference between full coverage and none at all.
Cost: The cost of massage insurance is small compared to that of a potential claim.
Compare: With something as important as massage insurance, always check out your options and compare results.
What Type of Insurance Do Massage Therapists Need?
Insurance that’s made for massage therapists is going to focus on key areas of risk. Liabilities are the risk of having to pay for something that the law says you're legally required to. With massage professionals, liabilities exist in many forms but the three main types are general liability, professional liability, and product liability. A solid massage insurance plan is going to provide generous coverage limits for each of these three.
Professional Liability Insurance for Massage
Professional liability goes by many names - malpractice insurance, errors and omissions insurance, PLI - but these all pertain to the same coverage type that applies to the services you provide.
A massage professional is expected to act exactly that—a professional. They need to take the time to get to know their clients' health history, their pain points, develop an action plan, as well as provide a safe space for the session to occur.
Professional liability coverage applies to third-party claims (meaning not you or your insurance company) for injuries or property damage that occur in the scope of providing your professional services i.e. massage therapy.
Professional Liability Claim Example: A quick example could be a therapist performing a deep tissue massage that simply goes too far and leaves a client hurt. After their session, they see their primary care provider who says they need to get additional treatment and rehab. They miss work while they recover and sometime later send you a demand for all their medical bills and lost wages since your session left them injured.
General Liability Insurance for Massage Therapy
General liability insurance really is just that. General coverage for a wide range of different events. General liability is something you’ve probably heard being called “slip and fall insurance”. That’s because this type of injury is unfortunately common and can actually cause serious injuries. The National Safety Council notes that hundreds of thousands of ER visits occur each year from slips and falls.
Now, this type of injury is definitely the one that gets all the press but there are many other forms of risk that fall under general liability. You can think of this coverage as an umbrella that protects you from third-party claims for injuries or property damage that occur in or around your massage suite.
General Liability Claim Example: A client is walking into their massage session when they slip and fall on your freshly waxed floors. Their injuries are severe and they need an ambulance. When all is said and done, you receive notice they intend to file suit for all the bills they have.
Product Liability Coverage in Massage
The third element in the trifecta of liability protection is product liability coverage. Massage therapists use all kinds of products to make for a great client session. Aromatherapy oils, massage oils—even cleaning products for the tables. Any one of these can, and does, cause allergic reactions which can be severe at times.
When a client has a bad reaction to a product you used in their session, they may demand that you pay for their medical bills. Allergic reactions that are severe enough can lead to anaphylaxis which the Mayo Clinic describes as a potentially life threatening reaction that can occur within seconds of exposure.
Additional Protections Provide 360 Degrees of Coverage
Massage Magazine Insurance Plus goes further with real protection mechanisms that build a solid wall around our members. Protections like stolen equipment coverage, rental damage coverage, and even an identity protection plan are going to stack on top of each other like plates of armor to ensure a therapist can practice what they love doing with absolute confidence.
What is Massage Therapy Insurance, Really?
Massage therapy insurance is designed to act as a safety net. No one likes to think about an accident occurring and most therapists are incredibly diligent professionals. But unfortunately, accidents can just happen, no matter how careful a therapist is. When a client comes in for a session, they are trusting that they will leave the facility feeling better than they went in and that they and their property will be safe while they are there.
Most often, accidents come out of the blue and most therapists simply don’t have a pile of cash sitting around for the “what ifs”. When an accident occurs and the injured party decides to sue to be compensated, suddenly there are legal fees, as well. This snowball in an instant could ruin someone’s career which is where the low cost of massage insurance is such a no-brainer for anyone looking to make a career in this profession.
All About the $$$: How Much Does Massage Therapy Insurance Cost?
A quick search for “how do I find cheap massage insurance” lends page after page of results. And while the price is definitely a driving factor for many of us with just about any purchasing decision, we would caution against making that the only criteria in your search for massage insurance coverage.
Here’s why: some plans out there may only cover a small handful of services like Swedish massage and deep tissue but then charge an additional fee if you want to be covered for others like hot stone and aromatherapy.
Other plans have different prices based on your location around the country and can tack on a fee or even drop coverage altogether if you ever have to move (Spoiler alert: MMIP covers hundreds of different modalities under the same plan and has built-in portability—you’re welcome).
Massage Magazine Insurance Plus took the whole “cheap massage insurance” thing a whole new way. By tailoring our program just for this industry and building each and every provision in a way that promotes accessibility and affordability, we have created a plan that runs about $0.46 per day and comes with phenomenal coverage and fantastic benefits. We’re pretty proud of that accomplishment because it means that real massage therapists benefit from great coverage that doesn’t break their budget.
Need to Know: What is Occurrence Form Coverage?
Remember when we said details matter? Well, occurrence form coverage is a BIG detail when it comes to massage therapy insurance and it all comes down to timing. There are pretty much two different coverage types—occurrence form and claims made policies.
Claims made says you have your entire term to make a claim when an unforeseen event pops up. Sounds cool, right? Well, the real world isn’t always so clean. Say you have a policy that runs from January 1 to December 31 and you are giving your last massage of the year on December 27th. Unfortunately, the client leaves the session injured and sends a demand letter from their attorney a few weeks later. With claims made, because your policy is already expired, you can’t go back and file a claim.
Occurrence form takes a completely opposite approach and says since the claim event happened when the policy was still active, it doesn’t matter if you had to wait a few weeks to file the claim and you can still file it for consideration. Occurrence form vs claims made can literally mean full coverage for a claim event versus having none at all.
Deciphering What’s the Best Massage Therapy Insurance
Breaking down everything we’ve covered here is really all about helping you find the best plan for yourself. We have a complete massage insurance comparison guide for those that want to see how our plan compares to other top programs just so you can see which is best for your unique path in this beneficial field. At the end of the day, we want to be known as being a support for massage therapists so that they can do their day-to-day with that much more confidence.
