If you have employees, yes. California requires workers’ compensation for any licensed contractor with employees, and the CSLB suspends the license automatically when the certificate lapses — the suspension is retroactive to the date coverage ended.

Yes. Liberty places fire protection contractor insurance nationwide, and the practice is based in Rocklin, California — Sacramento, Roseville and the northern half of the state are where most of the book sits.

Generally no. General liability responds to bodily injury and property damage, not to the cost of correcting a spacing error or a hydraulic calculation that misses. That exposure belongs to professional liability, which is why the two are placed together.

Not permanently. An experience modification is built from three years of payroll and claims data and excludes the most recent policy year, so a single bad year enters the calculation on a known schedule and drops out of it on one too.

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.

Almost always wording rather than limits. Blanket additional insured, primary and non-contributory, and waiver of subrogation all have to be supported by the underlying policy form before a certificate can state them — a certificate that claims coverage the form does not grant gets caught at review.