I work from home and nobody visits me. Do I need public liability at all?

The exposure is not limited to visitors to your premises: it includes damage you cause at a client’s site and injury arising from your activities anywhere. Whether that exposure is material for a given business is a question for someone licensed to advise, but "nobody comes here" is not the whole test.

My policy is called "combined liability". Which do I have?

The product name settles nothing. The schedule lists the operative sections and the limit for each, and that is where the answer is.

Can one certificate show both?

Yes, and many do. That is part of why the two get conflated. Read the classes listed rather than the heading.

Professional indemnity or public liability?

In short

Public liability asks what the business damaged. Professional indemnity asks what the business got wrong.
The names are used interchangeably by buyers, sellers and contract templates, which is why people renew the wrong one for years.
A contract asking for one is not satisfied by the other, and the certificate will show which you hold.

These two covers are confused more often than any other pair in Australian business insurance. People renew public liability for a business nobody ever visits, and buy professional indemnity for work that carries no advice at all.

The confusion is understandable: they are frequently sold together, sometimes on one certificate, and contract templates use the terms loosely. The distinction only becomes expensive at claim time.

The question each one answers

Public liability responds when the business is legally liable for injury to a person, or damage to property, that is not its own. Somebody trips on your cable; you crack a client’s benchtop; a load shifts and dents a car.

Professional indemnity responds when somebody suffers a financial loss because they relied on the business’s advice, design, service or judgement. Nothing needs to be damaged and nobody needs to be hurt.

A test that works most of the time: if the loss would still exist with nothing physically harmed, it is the professional indemnity question.

Why the wrong one gets bought

Contract templates are the main culprit. A course, a client onboarding pack or a supplier agreement asks for "liability insurance" and names a figure, and the recipient buys whichever product that phrase led them to.

The second cause is structural: many businesses genuinely need both. An IT consultant who visits client sites has an advice exposure and a physical one. A designer who specifies a product carries both the specification and the site visit. Holding one and assuming it covers the other is where the gap opens.

[Public liability insurance](/insurance/public-liability)
[Professional indemnity insurance](/insurance/professional-indemnity)

The structural difference nobody mentions

Public liability generally responds to events that happen during the policy period. Professional indemnity responds to claims first made during the policy period, whenever the work was done.

That single difference means continuity matters enormously on one and not on the other. A gap in public liability leaves the days in the gap exposed. A gap in professional indemnity can strand years of past work, because the policy that answers is the one in force when the complaint arrives.

This is the mechanism behind retroactive dates and run-off cover, and it is the most consequential thing to understand about the professional indemnity side.

Reading the certificate you already have

The certificate names the classes of cover and the limits for each. If it says public and products liability and nothing else, there is no professional indemnity on it, regardless of what the policy is called.

Where a contract asks for a class the certificate does not show, that is a mismatch to resolve before the work starts rather than after, and it is the single most common reason a certificate gets rejected.

Questions

I work from home and nobody visits me. Do I need public liability at all?: The exposure is not limited to visitors to your premises: it includes damage you cause at a client’s site and injury arising from your activities anywhere. Whether that exposure is material for a given business is a question for someone licensed to advise, but "nobody comes here" is not the whole test.
My policy is called "combined liability". Which do I have?: The product name settles nothing. The schedule lists the operative sections and the limit for each, and that is where the answer is.
Can one certificate show both?: Yes, and many do. That is part of why the two get conflated. Read the classes listed rather than the heading.

Sources

Moneysmart (ASIC) — General guidance on business insurance from the regulator’s consumer site.
Insurance Contracts Act 1984 (Cth) — Federal Register of Legislation — The statute governing insurance contracts in Australia, including the duty owed when taking out cover.