Does anyone have an insurance that pays if you're off sick and your self employed?

[MovingtoParadise]

I literally don't know what to search for?

I'm self employed and work part time. I remember there used to be something you could buy that was tax deductible?

An Accident/Sickness/Unemployment plan will give you short term cover (usually either 12 or 24 months) and is relatively cheap. It's very similar to a Mortgage Payment Protection Insurance and is designed to cover your basic household expenses/bills. If you claim and it pays out then the plan ends and cover stops. You can exclude the Unemployment section if you are self-employed and likely not to find yourself unemployed (e.g. you are not reliant on any one particular customer for the bulk of your work).

Or there is Income Protection which is more expensive but designed to continue even when in claim, so if you were long term sick it would continue to pay out until you either recovered or it reached the end of the term, usually retirement age. If you had a claim, recovered and went back to work, then had a different illness later on the cover is still in place if you needed to make another claim. There are limits as to how much cover you can choose to have but generally up to about 60% of your usual earnings.

There is obviously more smallprint relating to both types of policy that you'd need to make yourself aware of but hope that gives you a steer what to look for.

Thank you so much for that detailed explanation

We have two types of that insurance, one that kicks in immediately and one that kicks in after 6 months of illness when the first one stops, because they cover the two types of sickness, short and long term.

We have only ever claimed once in over a decade when Dh had an operation and was off work for a week.

It covered the basics but better than earning nothing.