How to Check a Contractor's Insurance Before Work Starts

Every listing on this site tells you what the state actually publishes about a company's insurance, and on most pages that line says the register publishes nothing at all. That is not a gap in our checking; it is a gap in the public record, and it is why the single most useful thing you can do before work starts costs one sentence: can you send me your current certificate of insurance?

This page is about the document that comes back. What it proves, what it does not prove, which of the two policies on it protects which of your problems, and the one phone call that separates a real certificate from a PDF someone edited.

What the state file can and cannot tell you

Start with the register anyway, because in a few states it answers part of the question for free. Washington L&I puts it plainly: checking a contractor online means you will at least know that the contractor has posted a minimum bond and purchased liability insurance. That is a real fact, published by the agency, and it is the reason every listing here links the official lookup.

Then look at how rare it is. Across the ten states this directory covers, we ingest the register that licenses each trade, and we hold the insurance and bond columns those registers publish. In six of them - Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, New Jersey and Virginia - thirteen registers holding 155,944 license records carry not one insurer name, not one insurance expiration date and not one bond amount between them. There is nothing to render, so our pages for those states say so instead of implying a check we cannot make.

Nothing in that paragraph means those contractors are uninsured, and it does not even mean the state asks nothing of them. Minnesota is the clearest illustration. While there is no state license required for mechanical contractors, businesses must file a $25,000 mechanical contractor bond with DLI in order to contract to perform gas, heating, ventilation, cooling, air conditioning, fuel burning or refrigeration work. The requirement is real and the amount is fixed; the published file simply records that a bond was filed and never what it is worth, which is why our Minnesota HVAC pages talk about a bond and never about a license. The register being silent is a fact about the register. It is not a fact about the contractor, and it is not something you can read a number out of.

The four states whose registers do publish something publish four different things:

• Texas plumbing. The state board records an insurance certificate expiration date on the license, and it shows lapses rather than hiding them: 891 of 8,623 current Responsible Master Plumber licenses, 10.3%, carry a date already past at our data date. Only 8 of those 891 are more than a year past, which is the shape of paperwork drift rather than of an uninsured trade.
• Washington. L&I publishes both the liability policy and the bond on the contractor registration, and the file is close to complete for two of its three populations: 2,183 of 2,185 active construction contractor registrations and 758 of 759 active HVAC registrations name a liability carrier. The electrical file names one on only 270 of 5,503, which is a hole in the dataset rather than a finding about electricians, and our code refuses to render it as a coverage statistic for exactly that reason. More in the Washington contractor bond report.
• Oregon. The CCB carries the insurance and the bond behind the BCD trade license, publishes expiration dates the way Texas does, and shows exactly one lapsed date among 2,588 active plumbing and electrical contractors.
• California. The sharpest case, and the one worth its own section below: CSLB publishes workers' compensation, not liability.

None of the four can tell you about a policy bound or canceled yesterday. A register is a periodic file; insurance is a live contract. That difference is the whole reason the certificate exists.

What a certificate of insurance is

A certificate of insurance, usually an ACORD form, is a one-page summary an insurer or its producer issues to show that a policy exists: who is insured, by which company, under which policy number, for which period, and at what limits. It is evidence about a policy. It is not the policy, and it does not add anything to it.

The regulator says this in the form's own words. New York's Department of Financial Services, in Office of General Counsel opinion 00-09-04 of 8 September 2000, quotes the language printed on the certificate itself: this certificate is issued as a matter of information only and confers no rights upon the certificate holder and this certificate does not amend, extend or alter the coverage afforded by the policies below. The same department publishes the approved ACORD 25 liability certificate that carries it.

Three consequences follow, and they are the reason people who hold a certificate still lose an argument with an insurer:

• It is a snapshot, taken on the day it was printed. A policy canceled the following week does not un-print the certificate. Nothing about the document updates itself.
• It is not proof of cover on the day of the loss. The only thing that can answer that question is the policy, and the only party who can answer it on a phone call is the insurer or the producer who issued the certificate.
• It does not enlarge the policy. If a limit or an endorsement is not in the policy, writing it on a certificate does not put it there.

That is not an argument against asking for one. It is an argument for treating the certificate as a lead: it tells you which carrier and which agency to ask. California's licensing board words the request as two halves for that reason - ask to see a copy of the Certificate of Insurance or ask for the name of the contractor's insurance carrier and agency to verify that the contractor has insurance. Most people do the first half. The second half is the check.

Liability and workers' compensation solve different problems

A certificate can carry several policies, and two of them matter to a homeowner for completely different reasons.

Commercial general liability answers "what happens if they damage my house". CSLB is direct about its status in California: commercial general liability insurance is not required; however, it covers damage to your property. Not required, and the thing that pays for your slab. Washington takes the other approach and makes it a registration condition, with published minimums of $200,000 in public liability and $50,000 property damage, or $250,000 combined single limit. Read those numbers next to the size of your job before you decide the limit on the certificate is comfortable.

Workers' compensation answers a question most homeowners never think to ask: what happens if someone is hurt on my property. CSLB states the rule - if a contractor has employees, they are required to carry workers' compensation insurance - and Washington L&I states the consequence of ignoring it in one sentence: you don't want uninsured workers on your roof. If they get hurt, you could be liable for their medical bills. An injury on a ladder in your driveway is not a liability claim. It is a workers' compensation claim, and if no policy answers it, the search for someone to pay tends to end at the person who owns the property.

California: the file says workers' comp, and it means it

California is where the distinction stops being academic, because CSLB publishes the one and not the other. The master license file we ingest carries 52 columns. Five of them describe the contractor bond, twelve more describe two further bonds, and seven describe the workers' compensation block: coverage type, carrier, policy number, effective, expiration, cancellation and suspension dates. Not one of the 52 names a general liability policy, a liability limit or a liability carrier. There is nothing to publish, and so no California listing on this site prints a liability figure.

What the file does publish, measured across the 186,394 licenses that read CLEAR in our copy of it: 93,987 name a workers' compensation policy, 50.4%. The other half is not an uninsured half. California lets a licensee with no employees file an exemption instead of a policy, and the exemption is a lawful filing, not a warning.

The interesting part is what happens when you split that number by classification, because CSLB removes the exemption for some trades: all active C-8 Concrete contractors, C-20 Warm-Air Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning contractors, C-22 Asbestos Abatement contractors, C-39 Roofing contractors, and/or C-61/D-49 Tree Service contractors are required to carry workers' compensation insurance or a valid Certification of Self-Insurance, whether or not they have employees. That rule is visible in the data. Among CLEAR licenses in our California set:

• C-20 heating and air conditioning: 10,626 of 10,834 name a policy, 98.1%.
• C-39 roofing: 4,855 of 5,251, 92.5%.
• C-36 plumbing: 7,853 of 16,209, 48.4%.
• C-10 electrical: 12,418 of 25,045, 49.6%.
• B general building: 39,127 of 90,900, 43.0%.

So the same blank field means two different things depending on the trade. On a Los Angeles roofing license or a San Diego HVAC license, a missing workers' compensation policy is unusual and worth a question, because the state does not allow those two classifications to opt out. On a plumbing or general building license it is the ordinary condition of an owner-operator. Neither case tells you anything at all about liability cover, which is why the certificate is still the only route to that answer in California.

One more California number, for scale: 186,208 of the 186,309 CLEAR licenses carrying a contractor bond carry it at exactly $25,000. CSLB explains why in one line - licensed contractors are required to have a contractor license bond of $25,000. A figure nearly everyone shares distinguishes nobody, which is why our California listings never rank on it, and it is worth remembering when a bond gets offered to you as reassurance about insurance. A bond is not insurance. It is money a customer can claim against, and in California nearly every license stands on the same $25,000 of it.

"Additional insured" is not the box with your name in it

A certificate has a certificate holder box. Putting your name in it means the certificate was addressed to you. It is a distribution position, not a coverage position, and on its own it changes nothing about who can claim.

Additional insured status is a different thing, made a different way. Sonoma County's contract insurance guidance defines it precisely: an additional insured is a party that does not qualify as an insured under the standard GL. They must be added by an endorsement that changes the "who is an insured" section of the policy. An endorsement is a change to the policy, issued by the insurer. If you want it, the document to ask for is the endorsement, not a line typed into a certificate.

Being a certificate holder is still worth asking for, because it is the position Washington's regulator takes on every single registration: L&I must be listed as a certificate holder for your liability insurance. The state puts itself on the paperwork rather than trusting a copy handed over at a counter. A homeowner asking for the same thing on a large job is asking for something entirely routine.

Verify with the issuer, not with the PDF

A certificate arrives as a PDF. PDFs are editable, and a certificate carries no signature, no seal and no serial number you can check. Everything above is why the verification step exists, and it is one phone call.

1. Read the producer line. Every certificate names the agency that produced it, with an address and a phone number.
2. Find that agency in your state's insurance regulator, not on the certificate. Washington's Office of the Insurance Commissioner runs an agent and company lookup tool that lets you verify if an agent or company is licensed in Washington and review disciplinary actions and complaints against companies and agents. Every state has an equivalent. Use the phone number the regulator publishes; a forged certificate can carry any number its author chooses.
3. Ask the agency to confirm the policy is in force today, and ask them to email the certificate to you directly. A certificate that arrives from the issuing agency's own address is current by construction, and a contractor with real cover can arrange it in minutes.

The five fields to read

1. The insured's name. It must match the business name on the license you verified, not a similar name and not a related company. A mismatch between the certificate and the license record is the single most common tell, and in states that license people rather than companies it is also the most common innocent explanation, so ask rather than assume.
2. Policy period. Today's date must fall between the effective and expiration dates, and so must the last day of your job. A policy that expires mid-project is worth a second certificate at renewal.
3. General liability limits. The per-occurrence figure is the one that answers "what if they crack my slab", and the aggregate is what remains after everyone else's claims this policy year. Blank or crossed-out limits are a red flag. Washington's registration minimums above are a floor for a registration, not a number sized to your house.
4. Workers' compensation. If the crew has employees, ask whether the certificate shows it, and if it does not, why not. In California, ask harder for roofing, HVAC, concrete, asbestos abatement and tree work, where the state removes the exemption.
5. The issuing agency's contact line. The one field that lets you check every other field. Nothing else on the page defeats a doctored PDF.

What a lapsed certificate on file actually signals

An expired date is not automatically a story about an uninsured contractor. What it means depends entirely on which register you are reading, and the three registers that publish dates disagree about that.

In California it is a status change, not a paperwork issue. CSLB is explicit: failure to maintain workers' compensation insurance coverage will result in the license being suspended, and any work performed while the license is suspended is considered to be unlicensed. A workers' compensation lapse in California does not sit quietly in a file; it moves the license out of CLEAR, which is the only status this site publishes. Even so, 2,625 of the 93,987 CLEAR licenses naming a policy carry an expiration date already past at our data date, 2.8% - the file's dates and the file's status can disagree, and that is one of several reasons a listing here is a starting point rather than a substitute for the lookup.

In Texas it is usually recent drift. 891 of 8,623 current licenses, with only 8 of them more than a year stale. A homeowner reading one of those records should ask for a current certificate, not conclude anything.

In Washington you will never see one. L&I publishes the policies currently on file and drops a lapsed policy from the dataset rather than showing it as lapsed, so a lapse rate cannot be computed there at all. The absence of an insurance row on a Washington registration is the signal, and it is a much weaker one than an expired date, because it can also mean the file simply does not cover that population.

Practically: an expired certificate is a request for a newer one. A contractor who cannot produce a current certificate, or who will not let you speak to the agency that issued it, has told you something that no date on a PDF could.

Red flags that mean keep asking

• The insured name does not match the licensed business name, and nobody can explain why.
• The expiration date has passed, or the job will outlast it.
• Only an insurance card or a premium receipt is offered; neither shows limits or a policy period.
• The contractor discourages you from calling the agency listed on the form, or offers to call on your behalf.
• The certificate names you as certificate holder and the contractor describes that as being "added to the policy".
• The limits are printed but the policy numbers are missing or blank.

Where this fits in a full check

Insurance is one leg of three. The license, or the state's equivalent credential, is the first, and it is the one you can settle for free in about a minute - verify it in the official lookup, or use the walk-through for California, Washington or Oregon. Insurance is the second, and the register answers it in four states out of ten and only partly even there. The contract is the third: California's licensing board is explicit that a customer should contract directly with the licensed contractor and pay that contractor directly, which is also exactly how this directory works.

Our methodology explains what we verify on every listing, and what we deliberately leave blank. Every company on the Seattle plumbing page, the Houston plumbing page and every other money page here was matched to the official register for its trade and state, with the license number and the date of the check printed on the row so you can repeat it. Then ask for the certificate, and call the agency on it.