Martial Arts School Insurance: Who Publishes a Price, and What It Buys
Martial Arts Professional Directory · Insurance
Insurance is the thing school owners look up more than any other business purchase in this industry — and it is the least transparently priced. Three providers publish a number. The long-established specialty houses that have written this class for decades publish none.
The demand nobody is answering
Across every business term this journal tracks — software, marketing, staffing, pricing, retention — the single most searched purchase in the martial arts school business is insurance. “Martial arts insurance” alone runs at about 320 US searches a month, roughly twice the volume of the most searched software term, with another 300 or so spread across school, instructor, BJJ, MMA, karate and dojo variants.
Almost none of that demand meets a published price. Insurance is genuinely harder to price in public than software — premiums move with state, square footage, headcount, programme mix, claims history and limits — but that explains a range, not silence. Three providers publish a starting figure. Everyone else requires a quote, including the programmes that have been writing martial arts schools longer than anyone else in the table.
What is actually published
| Provider | Published price | What it covers | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sadler Sports & Recreation Instructor programme |
From $370 a year | Individual instructor general liability, $1M–$5M limits, professional liability included, additional insureds at no extra charge, annual or single-event | Explicitly does not cover ownership or maintenance of a facility. This is instructor cover, not school cover — a distinction worth reading twice |
| Sadler Sports & Recreation Studio programme |
Not published — instant online quote | General liability $1M–$5M; professional liability automatically included; accident coverage to $150,000 subject to a $250 deductible; equipment and contents optional; abuse and molestation available; non-owned and hired auto included | Quotes and buys online rather than publishing a rate card |
| Gym Insurance by PushPress |
From $24 a month; states a median of about $114 a month, roughly $1,369 a year, across the martial arts gyms it insures, drawn June 2026 | Written for gym operations, with rolling, sparring, grappling and pad work named as normal operations rather than treated as an exclusion | Publishes a side-by-side putting “typical broker or specialty program” at $2,500–$3,200 a year. That is the seller’s own comparison, not an independent benchmark |
| American Specialty Express | “Prices start at $551” | Commercial general liability and accident medical. Increased liability limits, equipment and contents, abuse and molestation, and hired and non-owned auto are offered as options | Quotes, binds and issues certificates online around the clock. The programme page names no carrier — ask who is actually underwriting it, and its rating, before binding |
| K&K Insurance Martial arts schools programme |
Not published — online application, or PDF for anything outside the standard box | General liability covering bodily injury, property damage, personal and advertising injury and products and completed operations; professional liability with participant bodily injury and medical payments. Options include non-registered member activity, birthday parties, equipment and contents, abuse and molestation defence, tournament cover, excess liability, D&O and sexual abuse liability | The most explicit eligibility box published by anyone here. US schools only. MMA training is eligible; MMA competition is not. Boxing, wrestling and law-enforcement training are excluded. The online path drops to a PDF application for facilities over 3,000 square feet, climbing walls, inflatables, parkour or gymnastics programmes, open-gym access for non-members, or off-premises activity beyond competitions |
| K&K Insurance Martial arts instructors programme |
Not published — PDF enrolment | Bodily injury to participants liability and professional liability | Individual instructor cover with no online buy path: enrolment form, underwriting approval, then cover. Payment by cheque or card. K&K describes itself as a seventy-year sports, leisure and entertainment writer handling more than 350,000 events and organisations a year |
| Martial Arts Group Insurance | Not published — quote required | Liability, accident and medical expense, contents and equipment, and tournament cover. Publishes optional limits directly: $1,000,000 abuse and molestation and $10,000 medical payments | The reverse of most of this table — it publishes limits without publishing premiums. Martial-arts-only, based in Boca Raton, Florida, and states more than thirty years in the class and more than 10,000 schools insured |
The only provider publishing a full price range in this category is a school-software company that moved into insurance, and the competitor column in its comparison is its own estimate of what rivals charge. It may well be accurate. It is still a marketing claim by an interested party, and the brokers it describes have not answered it. Treat it as a starting hypothesis to test with two or three real quotes, not as the market rate.
A name worth clearing up: Rhulen
Rhulen comes up often enough among long-serving school owners that it deserves a straight answer rather than a row in the table. Rhulen is no longer a place a school owner can buy a policy.
The firm is real, it is trading, and it is old: by its own account Max Rhulen founded the Rhulen Agency in Monticello, New York in 1934, and his children added specialty programmes through the 1950s. But the business that trades today as Rhulen Specialty describes itself as working with “agents, brokers, insurance companies, reinsurers, captives, pool managers and insurance buyers” to build and support their programmes. It has moved up the chain into programme design, underwriting support and claims management for carriers and managing general agents. Its home, about and history pages carry no mention of martial arts, karate or sports schools at all.
The practical consequence for a school owner is simple: Rhulen may sit somewhere behind a programme you are quoted, but it is not a number to call for a dojo policy. If an agent quotes you and mentions the name, the question to ask is the same one you should ask about any programme — who is the carrier on the paper, and what is its rating.
The coverages that decide it
Price is the easy part to compare and the least likely to matter when something goes wrong. Four things separate a policy that responds from one that does not.
Is the activity actually covered?
A general business policy often prices a martial arts school as a higher-risk business than it is, or declines it, and some policies that are written exclude the very thing the school does. Sparring, rolling, grappling and full-contact work should be named as covered operations, not left to interpretation. K&K’s published eligibility rules are the clearest illustration of why this matters: the same programme that happily writes MMA classes will not write MMA competition, and a school that quietly adds a parkour class or opens the mat to non-members can move itself outside the box it was underwritten in without ever being told.
Participant accident cover
Liability responds when the school is at fault. Participant accident cover responds when a student is hurt and nobody is. Sadler publishes a $150,000 accident limit with a $250 deductible on its studio programme, and Martial Arts Group Insurance publishes a $10,000 medical payments limit; those are the kind of figures to compare directly, because accident cover is the one most often absent from a cheap quote.
Abuse and molestation
Offered as an option rather than as standard on every programme here, and increasingly the coverage that decides whether a school can hold a contract with a school district, a council or a franchise. Note that K&K lists abuse and molestation defence and sexual abuse liability as separate options — defence cost cover and liability cover are not the same purchase, and confusing them is expensive. It is also the risk that safeguarding practice exists to prevent in the first place — see NAPMA’s Safe Training Environment standard and its school owner checklist, which is the operational side of the same problem.
Professional liability
Cover for instruction itself — how you taught, what you told a student to do. Included automatically in both Sadler programmes and in both K&K programmes; confirm it is present elsewhere rather than assuming.
What to ask for in writing
- Named activities. Are sparring, grappling, rolling, weapons and full-contact classes listed as covered operations?
- Participant accident limit and deductible, stated separately from liability.
- Abuse and molestation — included, optional, or excluded; defence cost or full liability; and at what limit.
- Age ranges. Under-fives, after-school programmes and summer camps are frequently rated or excluded separately.
- Off-site activity. Demonstrations, tournaments, gradings, camps and travel.
- Square footage and added programmes. Several programmes change their underwriting path above a floor-space threshold or when a non-martial-arts activity is added.
- Additional insureds. Landlords, school districts and event hosts usually require it; ask whether it costs extra.
- Whether the policy is occurrence or claims-made, and what happens to cover if you change carriers.
- Who the carrier is, not just the broker or programme name, and its rating.
Methodology
Every figure was read from the provider’s own published pages on 9 September 2026. Where a provider does not publish a price, the table says so rather than estimating one. Where a provider’s website refused automated access — which was the case for Sports Fitness Insurance Corporation on that date — the provider is named and the gap is stated rather than filled with a figure from elsewhere.
K&K Insurance and Rhulen were added at the request of a reader who noted both as long-standing names in this class. Both were then researched from their own websites only, and both are reported as found: K&K as an active writer of two martial arts programmes that publishes no rate, Rhulen as a 1934-founded specialty house that no longer sells to school owners at all.
Search demand figures are Semrush estimates for the US database on the same date.
No provider was contacted before publication, given advance sight of this page, or invited to review it. This entry will be expanded as further providers publish rates or supply them on the record. Corrections are published under our editorial policy.
This is reporting on what providers publish, not insurance advice. Cover, exclusions and adequacy for your school have to be confirmed with a licensed broker in your state.
Disclosure
Martial Arts Professional has no advertising, affiliate or referral relationship with any provider listed on this page and receives no commission on any policy a reader buys. No fee was accepted for inclusion or for position.
The magazine is published by NAPMA, the National Association of Professional Martial Artists, whose CEO and Chairman, Grand Master Stephen Oliver, also founded Martial Arts Wealth Mastery, a coaching company for school owners. NAPMA publishes the Safe Training Environment standard referenced above. If a commercial relationship ever exists between any of those organisations and a provider listed here, it will be named in that provider’s row.
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The Martial Arts Professional Directory · School management software · Who collects your tuition · NAPMA Safe Training Environment