Frequently Asked Question:

What Insurance Do Fire Protection Contractors Need? 

Insurance Type
Related Industries
Fire Protection
Construction
Contractors & Trades
Related Coverages
Workers’ Compensation
General Liability
Professional Liability
Commercial Auto
Umbrella / Excess

The Short Answer

General liability with products and completed operations, workers’ compensation if you have employees, commercial auto, and errors and omissions if you design, lay out or inspect systems. What your general contractors write into the subcontract usually sets the real floor.

The Full Answer

Four lines do most of the work for a sprinkler, alarm or suppression contractor, and each one answers a different kind of claim. Knowing which is which is what keeps a contractor from discovering the gap during a loss rather than during a renewal. 

What each line actually covers: 

General liability with products and completed operations. Bodily injury and property damage from your work, including after you have left the site. Completed operations is the part that matters in this trade, because a claim from an installation rarely arrives during the policy year the installation happened. 

Errors and omissions. The cost of a professional mistake — a hydraulic calculation that misses, head spacing that leaves a coverage gap, a deficiency missed on an inspection report. General liability excludes all of it. 

Workers’ compensation. Required in California for any licensed contractor with employees, and the line most likely to cost you a license rather than just a claim. 

Commercial auto. Service trucks, pipe delivery and any long-haul running you do. Owned, hired and non-owned, because someone on your crew will eventually run a job in their own vehicle. 

Property, inventory and inland marine usually follow close behind, since pipe, heads, extinguishers and test gear are worth more sitting in a van overnight than most contractors insure them for. 

How Liberty structures your protection: 

Liberty places this as one program rather than four disconnected policies — general liability at $1,000,000 per occurrence and $2,000,000 aggregate with errors and omissions included by endorsement, umbrella and excess to $5,000,000, and workers’ compensation, auto and property written alongside it. 

Related Questions

Yes — restaurants process card payment data through point-of-sale systems daily, and a breach affecting customer payment information typically isn’t covered under general liability, which is why cyber liability is now considered standard for the industry.

A restaurant’s own commercial auto policy typically doesn’t cover an employee’s personal vehicle, so restaurants using employee-owned cars for delivery generally need hired and non-owned auto liability coverage.

Typically no — standard business interruption coverage is triggered by direct physical damage to the property, so a closure ordered for a health code violation alone usually isn’t a covered event unless it follows a covered loss.

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