Business insurance in Orange County, where most of the hard placements are contractors.

Almost certainly a residential or tract exclusion sitting on the policy. It is one of the most common endorsements in the California contractor market and it is easy to miss, because the declarations page still says general liability and the certificate still prints. The exclusion removes the work rather than reducing it, so the claim is denied rather than shared. Read the endorsement schedule rather than the declarations, and if you are moving between commercial and residential work say so before the job starts rather than after.

Usually the additional insured wording rather than the limits. Most subcontracts require both ongoing and completed operations, and a policy that grants only ongoing satisfies a quick read and disappears the day the project finishes. Primary and non-contributory wording and a waiver of subrogation are the other two rejections we see weekly. All three are endorsements rather than limits, which means the fix is a policy change and not more money.

Send us the certificate request

Their payroll becomes yours. California auditors treat an uninsured subcontractor as your employee for rating purposes, so the audit bill arrives with their labor added to your payroll at your rate. Collecting a certificate before anybody starts is the entire defense, and collecting it once is not enough, because the certificate expires while the job runs. Keep the current one on file for every sub for as long as the work continues.

How a premium audit works

For a contractor it prices off your trade, your payroll and whether you touch residential, and the residential answer moves the number more than anything else on the application. A commercial only tenant improvement contractor and an identical firm doing condominium work are different risks to every carrier in the state. For an office based business the range starts far lower, near $500 a year for general liability alone.

One structure, and it is usually several policies inside it, each naming every entity it has to answer for. The mistake is not the number of policies, it is an employee working for a subsidiary that no policy names. We set this up for a Georgia holding company with six operating subsidiaries and a shared workforce, and the gaps we found were in the places the owners had not thought of as insurable businesses at all, a technology services arm with no errors and omissions and a party planning arm with no event liability. Start with a list of every entity, what each one does, and which people work for more than one.

Technology errors and omissions insurance

The policies look alike; the rules underneath do not. Each state has its own regulator, its own workers comp threshold and rating bureau, its own surplus-lines rules, and its own quirks: percentage windstorm deductibles in Florida, the FAIR Plan in California, monopolistic workers comp in Ohio, Washington, North Dakota and Wyoming. The state pages below carry those specifics with sources.

Yes. Boring Insurance Agency is licensed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Every state page names the regulator where you can verify that.

Mostly no, and relying on them is the classic mistake. State minimum auto limits are written for personal cars; commercial contracts check certificates against $1M. Workers comp is the exception. Its threshold is genuinely state law, and it is on each state page with the statute.