Hot work in the shop is one risk. Hot work on their site is another.
What happens in the shop, what happens on installation and what happens if the structure fails are three different exposures. We cover a welding shop for all of them.
Tell us the situation.
One licensed human replies the same business day — not five agents, not an auto-responder. If the policy you have is already the right one, we will tell you.
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Send us what you have. We’ll tell you if it’s right.
Your current policy paperwork, a renewal notice, or nothing at all. A licensed agent reads it and replies the same business day.
What metal fabrication businesses actually need.
General and products liability
Injury or damage from the work and from what you fabricated.
Without it — Structural failure claims are severe and slow, and arrive after the job is long closed.
Workers compensation
Welders, fitters and installers, including crews working at height or on a customer’s site.
Without it — Hot work and erection are two of the heaviest class codes a shop can carry, and they price separately.
Completed operations
Work installed and signed off that fails afterwards.
Without it — General liability stops when you leave the site; this is the part that does not.
Installation floater
Your materials in transit and on site before the customer accepts them.
Without it — Fabricated steel stolen from a site is your loss until handover.
Hot work exposure
Welding and cutting away from your premises, which carries its own conditions.
Without it — A fire-watch warranty breached is a fire claim declined.
Contractors equipment
Welders, generators, torches and rigging away from the shop.
Without it — Property coverage is tied to the premises; the kit that earns is mobile.
Group health and benefits
Certified welders, whose certifications you paid for.
Without it — Welding certifications are per-process and per-position, and they leave with the welder.
What our metal fabrication clients ask us.
We fabricate and install. Is that one policy?
It should be, and it often is not, which is where the gap opens. Fabrication reads as manufacturing and installation reads as contracting, and a policy bought for one can exclude the other. Say plainly what proportion of revenue is install work, because a shop described as pure fabrication that installs a third of its output has a coverage argument waiting for the first site accident.
What is a hot work permit condition?
A warranty on your policy, not a suggestion. Typically: clear combustibles within a set radius, an extinguisher present, a fire watch during the work and for a period after — thirty or sixty minutes — and a written permit. Breach it and a resulting fire claim can be declined outright. It is the single most enforced condition in this trade and the one most often treated as paperwork.
Does structural work need something different?
Usually yes. Load-bearing and structural steel carry severity that general fabrication does not, and if you also detail or engineer the connections you have professional liability alongside the products coverage, and a design error is not a products claim. Shops that grew from jobbing work into structural often carry the policy they started with.
Commercial insurance is 96% of what we do — it is not a department here, it is the whole business. Not ready to talk? The guides answer the questions this page raises in more depth. Already insured with us and need a certificate or a policy change? Ask the service team rather than starting a quote — it is faster and it goes to the people whose job it is. We also write home and auto, which is usually cheaper alongside the business policy than apart from it.
Handed a lease, a vendor packet or a client contract with insurance requirements? Paste it into the COI Requirements Decoder to see what each one means for your business, or read what the requirements mean.