Cyber Insurance Cover Calculator: How Much Cover Do You Need?

Buying cyber insurance is only half the decision. The other half is the cover limit (also called the indemnity limit): the most the policy will pay for a single claim. Set it too low and a serious breach eats through your cover long before the bills stop arriving. This calculator sizes a sensible starting limit from your turnover, the volume of personal data you hold, your sector and how you take payments.

Two things drive a cyber claim: the cost of putting your systems back (incident response, lost trading, ransom and recovery) and the cost of the data itself (breach notification, regulatory work and third-party liability). The calculator scales the first with your turnover and the second with the number of records you hold, then loads it for higher-risk sectors and payment exposure.

How the estimate is built

The figures below are planning assumptions to give you a defensible starting point, not a quote and not verified market statistics. Your broker will refine the limit against your real contracts, claims history and the controls you have in place.

• Recovery and interruption: a share of annual turnover, because downtime and rebuild costs scale with the size of the business.
• Data liability: a per-record planning allowance for notification, support and legal handling if those records are exposed.
• Sector loading: regulated and high-value sectors (healthcare, finance, online retail) carry more third-party and regulatory exposure.
• Payment and special-category loadings: taking card payments or holding sensitive data raises both the likelihood and the cost of a claim.

The result is rounded up to the nearest standard cover tier insurers actually offer (£100k, £250k, £500k, £1m and so on), and we show the next tier up as headroom for businesses that want a wider margin.