Business insurance in San Diego, where the contract usually sets the limits before the carrier does.

Read the insurance exhibit before you negotiate the price, because it is frequently negotiable and almost nobody tries. Large primes issue one standard exhibit to every subcontractor regardless of size, and a firm doing $200,000 of work is handed the same requirement as one doing $20M. Where the limit genuinely cannot move, an umbrella over the underlying policies is usually far cheaper than raising each primary limit, and the additional insured and waiver wording is often the part that actually needs fixing rather than the number.

Reading the paperwork you are asked to sign

If a contract says so, then yes, and revenue has nothing to do with it. A contract manufacturer, a clinical site or a distributor names insurance as a condition of signing, and the requirement arrives at the moment you want to move rather than at the moment you start selling. Pricing is driven by the product and the trial design rather than by sales, so a pre-revenue company is not automatically cheap and is not automatically expensive either.

Yes, from your first employee, with no threshold and no election out anywhere in California. Two things catch growing companies here. Founders and officers have specific rules about whether they can be excluded, and misclassifying a worker as a contractor does not remove the obligation, because an auditor who disagrees assesses the payroll anyway.

California workers compensation in detail

For an office based technology or professional firm, general liability alone often starts near $500 a year, with professional liability priced off revenue and the nature of the work. For anything with a product, a trial or a defense contract behind it the contract requirements dominate the number, which is why the useful first step is sending us the insurance exhibit rather than describing the business.

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.