A Neighbour's Kid Gets Hurt on Your Trampoline: Who Pays?

If a neighbour's child is hurt on your trampoline, the claim lands on you — and in Canada, serious trampoline injuries produce claims from $50,000 for a badly broken arm to several million dollars for a spinal or brain injury. Under the occupiers' liability statutes in most provinces, you owe a duty of reasonable care to people who come onto your property. That duty covers the kids you invited over — and, more often than owners expect, the ones you didn't.

Here's the scenario, the numbers, and where the gap is.

The scenario#

A composite of the cases Canadian insurers and courts actually see:

It's a Saturday in July. Your ten-year-old has two friends over, and a fourth kid — the nine-year-old from two doors down — wanders into the yard and climbs on. Nobody says no. Two kids double-bounce him, he lands wrong at the edge of the mat, and he fractures two vertebrae. Surgery, months in a brace, and an open question about long-term nerve damage.

Eight months later, a lawyer's letter arrives: a claim against you for $1.2 million — future care, physiotherapy for years, loss of future earning capacity for a child whose adult income no one can predict, and pain and suffering. The letter notes you had no enclosure net, no posted rules, no adult watching, and a yard anyone could walk into.

You didn't invite him. It doesn't matter as much as you'd hope.

Who you owe a duty to#

The American term is "attractive nuisance" — the idea that some features practically summon children. Canadian statutes don't use those words, but the occupiers' liability Acts in most provinces get to a similar place: what counts as "reasonable care" scales with how foreseeable the visitor is and how little danger they can appreciate. A backyard trampoline scores badly on both.

The pattern across Canadian premises cases is consistent: the younger the child, the less their own carelessness counts against them, and the more the court asks what you did to prevent exactly this. "The kids were fine all afternoon" is not a system. It's luck.

One more myth to retire: a parent's casual "sure, he can jump" — or even a signed waiver — doesn't dispose of the child's own claim. In most provinces a parent can't sign away a minor's right to sue, and courts guard that right closely. Permission from the parents changes the social picture, not the legal one.

What it costs#

Trampolines injure in a specific way — awkward landings on necks, heads, and outstretched arms, plus the double-bounce, which launches the lighter child with force they can't control. Canadian paediatric bodies have warned about backyard trampolines for years for exactly this reason.

Illustrative editorial estimates based on the pattern of Canadian claims, not quotes.

The mechanics of a big Canadian award matter here. Pain and suffering is capped — roughly $450,000 even in catastrophic cases, a ceiling the Supreme Court set in 1978 and has adjusted for inflation since. What blows past policy limits is everything stacked on top: cost of future care, future surgeries, attendant care, and lost earning capacity. For an injured nine-year-old, courts price out those needs across seventy years or more.

Which policy responds — and where it stops#

The personal liability section of your homeowner, condo, or tenant policy is the one that answers a trampoline claim. It hires and pays your lawyers — defence costs alone can run well into five figures — and it pays the settlement or judgment up to your liability limit, which for most Canadian households is $1 million.

Trampolines, though, come with their own set of gaps:

• Trampoline exclusions and surcharges. Trampolines sit on many Canadian insurers' high-risk lists alongside pools and certain dog breeds. Some insurers exclude trampoline liability outright; others charge more or require a safety enclosure and a fenced yard as a condition of coverage. Read your policy — this is buried in the exclusions, not the brochure.
• The disclosure problem. Adding a trampoline is the kind of change in risk insurers expect to hear about. If your insurer never knew it existed, you're handing them an argument at exactly the moment you can least afford one.
• The unfenced yard. No fence hurts twice: it makes the uninvited-child claim easier to win against you, and it can put you offside any safety conditions your insurer attached.
• The limit itself. The composite claim above is $1.2 million. A standard $1 million policy leaves you $200,000 short before the interest and the above-limit defence bills — and a worse spinal injury leaves you short by millions.
• After the limit, you're alone. Once the insurer pays out its limit, its duty to defend generally ends. What's left of the judgment is enforced against you — a lien on the house, garnished wages, seized savings.

How umbrella coverage changes the outcome#

A personal umbrella policy sits over your home policy and adds $1 million to $10 million of protection — typically $200–$300 per year for the first $1 million, and roughly $50–$75 per year for each additional million (estimates based on typical Canadian broker pricing, not quotes). In this scenario it does three things:

1. Catches the part of the judgment above your home policy's limit — the difference between a bad year and a lost house.
2. Keeps paying defence costs after the base policy is exhausted.
3. Covers the household broadly — your kids' liability, incidents away from home — because it follows the family, not the backyard.

The honest caveat: umbrella applications ask about trampolines too. An insurer may require the same netting and fencing, or decline. Which is the whole point — the time to sort this out is before the double-bounce, not in the eight months before the lawyer's letter.

The bottom line#

A trampoline is one of the few purchases that quietly rewrites your legal position: you now own the thing on the block most likely to injure a child, and occupiers' liability law expects you to act like it. Fence the yard, net the trampoline, enforce one-jumper-at-a-time, and tell your insurer it exists. Then look at your liability limit and ask the only question that matters: if the landing is worse than a broken arm, whose money covers the rest?