General liability insurance for contractors: coverage, additional insureds, and the wording that gets you on site

What general liability insurance covers for contractors

General liability insurance for contractors covers two distinct things that share one policy: premises and operations liability — bodily injury or property damage you cause to third parties while the work is happening — and completed operations liability, the same harm caused by your finished work after you have left the job. A passerby hit by a dropped tool, a pipe you cut flooding the suite below, a customer tripping over your cords: premises and operations. A connection that fails eight months after closeout and floods the kitchen: completed operations. Both insuring agreements live in the standard commercial general liability form, and contractors get sued under both.

Just as load-bearing is what GL does not cover. It does not pay to redo your own defective work — the policy responds to damage your work causes, not the cost of correcting it. It does not cover injuries to your own employees (workers compensation), vehicles (commercial auto), tools and equipment (inland marine), or errors in design and engineering work (professional liability). A contractor who knows where GL stops buys the rest of the program deliberately instead of discovering the edges in a denial letter.

Completed operations: where construction claims actually live

The claims that threaten a contracting business are rarely the jobsite slip-and-fall — they are construction defect claims that surface years after completion: water intrusion behind cladding, settlement from compaction work, electrical and mechanical failures, the roof that fails in its third winter. These land in the completed operations coverage of whatever occurrence-form policy was in force when the damage occurred, which means each year of work stays a live exposure for years afterward — generally bounded by each state’s statutes of repose and limitation, which vary widely.

Two practical consequences. First, continuity matters: a coverage gap creates uninsured years that defect claims can fall into, and switching carriers carelessly can strand old work. Second, the standard form’s “your work” exclusion carries a subcontractor exception — damage arising from work performed on your behalf by subcontractors can be covered where your own self-performed work is not — and many carriers attach endorsements that narrow or delete that exception. Which version you bought is not a footnote for a GC; it is the policy.

• Keep completed-operations coverage continuous — defect claims attach to the policy in force when damage occurs, not when the work was done.
• Ask explicitly whether the your-work exclusion’s subcontractor exception has been endorsed away.
• Keep job files, subcontracts, and certificates for at least the repose period in your states — they are the defense file a decade later.

Additional insured: ongoing versus completed operations forms

When a GC or owner requires additional insured status, the sophisticated ask is two endorsements, not one: ongoing-operations coverage (the ISO CG 20 10 family or a carrier equivalent) protecting them while your crew is on site, and completed-operations coverage (the CG 20 37 family) protecting them after the work is done. Because defect claims arrive after completion, a certificate showing only ongoing-ops additional insured status fails review at any GC with real construction counsel — and discovering that mid-job means waiting on carrier underwriting you do not control.

The structural fix is blanket additional insured wording — endorsements that grant the status automatically wherever a written contract requires it, ongoing and completed ops both — bound onto the policy at placement. And one thing certificates cannot do: a COI is evidence, not coverage. The endorsement on the policy is what pays; a certificate asserting status the policy does not back protects no one and creates an E&O claim against whoever issued it.

Waiver of subrogation, primary and noncontributory, contractual liability

A waiver of subrogation means your carrier agrees not to recover from the other contracting party after paying a claim on your behalf. Construction contracts demand it routinely on both GL and workers compensation, blanket versions are available on each, and the workers comp version is the one that surprises trades — it is a separate endorsement with its own small premium charge tied to the payroll on waived jobs.

Primary and noncontributory wording means your policy pays first for claims within the additional insured grant and does not ask the GC’s own insurance to contribute. It is a risk transfer onto your program, it is utterly standard on commercial work, and it must actually be endorsed — the checkbox on the certificate is not the endorsement, and good GCs ask for the endorsement copy.

Contractual liability is the piece of the CGL that picks up the indemnity you give in the subcontract — the clause where you agree to hold the GC harmless for claims arising from your work. The standard form covers liability assumed in an “insured contract,” which reaches most construction indemnity provisions, but anti-indemnity statutes in many states limit how much of the GC’s own negligence you can lawfully absorb, and carrier endorsements can narrow the grant. The indemnity clause and the insurance exhibit should be read together, before signing — they are two halves of one risk transfer.

Limits, per-project aggregates, and the umbrella

The standard commercial ask is one million per occurrence and two million general aggregate, with completed operations carrying its own aggregate. The trap on a multi-job book is that the general aggregate is shared across every project: claims on one job erode the limit available to all the others, which is why larger GCs require a per-project aggregate endorsement reinstating the full aggregate for each job. When contract requirements exceed your primary limits, an umbrella or excess policy over the GL — and usually auto and employers liability — is the standard structure: cheaper than raising each underlying limit individually, but only as good as its follow-form wording, which deserves the same exclusion read as the primary.

The exclusions that gut contractor policies

Contractor GL is the line where the cheapest quote is most often the most expensive policy, because the discount is usually an exclusion. Some forms condition coverage on every subcontractor carrying their own insurance — a subcontractor warranty or “sub-out” provision under which one uninsured sub can void coverage for the claim or collapse the limits. Residential, condominium, and tract-home exclusions remove the work some contractors do most of, and they are common on exactly the wholesale forms that quote cheapest. And in New York, action-over exclusions strip coverage for injured-employee claims that flow back to you through owner and GC indemnity under the state’s Labor Law — an exclusion that makes a policy nearly unusable for New York structural work, and that an entire market segment exists to avoid.

None of these appear on the certificate. They appear in the forms schedule, which is why comparing contractor GL quotes on price and limits alone is comparing the part of the policy that matters least.

General liability versus professional liability

GL covers bodily injury and property damage; it excludes professional services. The moment a contractor takes on design responsibility — design-build delivery, delegated design on connections or systems, value-engineering a stamped drawing — claims arising from the design itself fall to a professional liability policy, not the CGL. Trades with engineering content, like mechanical design-build and fire protection, live with this line daily. The screening question is simple: if the alleged error is in the drawings, calculations, or specifications rather than the installation, GL is the wrong policy, and contractors professional liability is the placement. Many contractors carry both precisely because real claims rarely sort themselves cleanly into one bucket.

The COI workflow with GCs

For a working contractor, the GL program is judged in practice by one document: the certificate of insurance that gets your crew on site. The structure described above — blanket additional insured for ongoing and completed operations, blanket waivers of subrogation, primary and noncontributory wording endorsed at bind — turns nearly every COI request into a same-day clerical task instead of an underwriting event. At Delegance, standard ACORD 25 certificates issue in seconds through the portal, ChatGPT, Claude, Slack, email, or phone, and custom holder wording is produced within minutes after a licensed broker confirms it; there is no per-COI fee. Coverage terms, endorsement availability, and pricing vary by carrier and state and are always subject to underwriting.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Builders risk insurance: how course-of-construction coverage actually works →
• Contractor insurance: the policies, the requirements, and how a working program fits together →