The commute is the risk no one insures for

The office has fire drills, a first-aid kit and a safety officer. The place your people are actually most likely to be hurt has none of that. It is the road, twice a day, every day.

On the morning of 24 September, a sleeper bus caught fire on the Yamuna Expressway near Greater Noida, and several passengers lost their lives. The human loss is the part that matters most. But it also points at a risk that sits in plain sight and rarely makes it into a benefits plan: the road. For working-age adults, road accidents are among the leading causes of accidental death and serious disability, well ahead of accidents at work. They happen on the commute, on a work trip, or on a bus a company arranged.

Employee benefits are built almost entirely around health, meaning treatment when someone falls ill. That matters, and it should be there. But it leaves the road, where your people spend hours every week, largely unaddressed. The cover built for that gap is group personal accident, and it is worth understanding what it actually does before the next bad morning, not after.

Put simply: group personal accident cover pays a benefit if an employee suffers an accidental injury, disability or death, and it is typically round-the-clock rather than limited to working hours, so it can respond to a road accident on the commute or a work trip as much as one at the workplace, subject to the policy wording.

The office is safe. The road isn’t.

A modern workplace is, for the most part, a low-risk place to spend a day. The journey to and from it is not. Yet almost all the attention, and almost all the benefits budget, goes to health cover for illness, while the daily exposure far more likely to seriously harm a working adult, the road, is treated as somebody else’s problem. It is not a failure of care so much as a blind spot, and blind spots are exactly the kind of thing worth naming out loud.

Cover that follows the person, not the desk

What makes group personal accident the right answer here is that it follows the person rather than the premises. It typically responds round the clock and wherever the person is, so an accident on the commute, on a work trip, or on an ordinary evening is within its scope in a way that workplace-only cover is not. This is the same feature that lets it reach an employee hit by a disaster at home, and it is what makes it the natural companion to a health policy rather than a duplicate of one.

When you put your people on a bus

There is an added layer for any employer that arranges transport, a staff bus, contracted cabs, or coaches for an offsite. The moment you put your people on a vehicle you organised, a duty of care for that journey sits with you, and questions of liability can follow if something goes wrong. That does not mean avoiding transport; it means choosing operators carefully, and making sure the people on board are covered by their own accident and health benefits regardless of whose vehicle it is.

What a family actually receives

Set against a real event, the covers sort themselves. If an employee is injured, group health answers for the hospitalisation. If they are disabled or killed, group personal accident pays the benefit the moment demands, and group term life provides the family’s longer protection where the earner is lost. Where the accident happens in the course of work, the employer’s liability under workmen’s compensation can also come into play. None of these is arranged after the fact; they are decisions made on the schedule, in the calm.

How a road accident maps to cover

It helps to separate what a road accident does, because each loss is answered by a different cover. This is category-level — it describes how cover generally works, not any one insurer’s product.

A five-minute check before the next trip

You don’t need a full review to find the biggest gaps. Five questions usually surface them:

1. Is your personal accident cover round-the-clock?Confirm it covers the commute and road travel, not just an accident at the workplace. That single line decides whether the road is covered at all.
2. If an employee died or was disabled on the road, what would the family receive?Understand in plain terms what group personal accident and group term life would do, and whether the amount reflects the life it is meant to replace.
3. Do your heaviest travellers have enough cover?Sales teams, field staff and anyone often on the road carry more exposure. Their cover should reflect that, not a flat default.
4. If you arrange transport, have you thought about the duty of care?Choosing operators carefully and making sure passengers are covered by their own benefits is part of putting people on a vehicle you organised.
5. If a claim followed, who assembles and argues it?Knowing in advance whether that is your job or someone else’s is the quiet difference on the worst day.

A note on this page. Everything here is general information, not insurance, legal, financial or tax advice, and nothing is an offer. Cover, including whether personal accident cover is round-the-clock and how it treats a commute, depends on your own policy wording. The extent of an employer’s duty of care and liability for arranged transport should be confirmed with counsel. Incident details reflect public reporting of 24 September 2026. For advice about your situation, talk to us.