Contractor insurance requirements by state

CGL, the licence bond and workers’ comp are not one product

Search “does a contractor need insurance” and the pages that answer will, almost without exception, treat “insurance” as a single object a contractor either has or lacks. That is the sentence that produces the bad hire. The three instruments that actually exist in American contractor regulation are a commercial general-liability (CGL) policy, a contractor licence (or registration) bond, and a workers’-compensation policy. They are underwritten by different markets, they pay different claimants, and a board can require any combination of them — including none — as a condition of the credential.

Source fact: California’s Contractors State License Board, on its own consumer page retrieved 5 September 2026, tells homeowners to verify workers’ compensation and commercial general liability separately, then adds, in the Board’s own words, that “Commercial general liability insurance is not required; however, it covers damage to your property.” The same page requires a $25,000 contractor licence bond of every active licensee. That is one board, on one day, drawing the three-instrument line this page is built on.

HyreRemodel analysis: the useful question is never “are they insured?” The useful questions are: insured for whose injury, under which instrument, at what limit, with whom named, and can you see it on a public register or only on a certificate the insurer issued this week?

The distinction that makes the table readable

Before any row below can be quoted, one distinction has to be nailed down, because almost every published “contractor insurance by state” table gets it wrong.

Whether an instrument is a condition of the credential is a different question from whether it is required by law at all. North Carolina’s Licensing Board for General Contractors states, on its own FAQ retrieved 5 September 2026: “There is not an insurance requirement for licensing.” That is a source fact about the NCLBGC credential. It is not a source fact about North Carolina’s Workers’ Compensation Act. The Board’s next sentence on the same page is that workers’ compensation “is required by NC state laws” and points the reader to the Industrial Commission. Those are two agencies, two statutes, two registers. Merging them into one cell labelled “required” produces a table that cannot be checked against either.

The two questions have different practical consequences. If cover is a condition of the credential, the licensing authority took evidence of it at least once — an affidavit, a certificate, a surety rider — and will normally have a record, even if that record is not public. If it is only an obligation of employment law, nobody at the licensing board checked it at the point the badge was issued, and there may be no contractor-shaped register to consult at all.

The matrix below records only the first question: what the residential general-contractor (or municipal) credential itself demanded. Workers’ compensation as general employment law is handled in the Texas section, where it is the unusual case, and in the North Carolina and Arizona notes, where it is the ordinary case we did not re-litigate. A null cell is not a “no.”

What the credential itself demands

Two poles, and they are not where a national round-up would put them. Florida makes public-liability insurance and workers’ compensation conditions of the CILB licence, by statute, with dollar floors in board rule — and does not publish the policies on the public search. California publishes the bond and the workers’-comp filing on every licence detail page we stored, and does not require CGL of most licensees. North Carolina’s board requires neither insurance nor a flat bond. Texas cannot require any of the three of a general contractor at state level because it does not license the occupation.

HyreRemodel analysis: competence checking and financial checking are almost independent of one another. That is the same pattern the roofing counterpart of this study found in a different set of boards, and it is not a claim about contractor quality in any state. A homeowner who treats “the state requires insurance” as a proxy for “this firm is careful” is reading a licensing statute as a character reference. It is not one.

What the dollar floors actually are — and what they are not

A statutory minimum is the least the law will tolerate to issue or renew the credential. It is not a recommendation, not an estimate of the damage a kitchen remodel can do, and not the limit a lender or a general contractor will accept. Treating $100,000 of public-liability cover as “enough” because a board rule says so is a category error: the rule is answering a licensing question, not an exposure question.

Source fact, Florida. Fla. Stat. §489.115(5)(a) requires, as a prerequisite to initial issuance or renewal, an affidavit that the applicant has obtained workers’ compensation as required by chapter 440, public liability insurance, and property damage insurance, “in amounts determined by rule of the board.” The rule is Florida Administrative Code 61G4-15.003 (Public Liability Insurance), effective 15 November 2007 and still the adopted rule on flrules.org as of this retrieval. Cornell LII’s publication of that rule lists general contractor and building contractor at $300,000 public liability and $50,000 property damage; residential, roofing, plumbing, mechanical, sheet metal, pool, solar, underground utility and “specialty contractors, unless specified otherwise” at $100,000 / $25,000. The certificate holder on the form the rule describes is the State of Florida, Department of Business and Professional Regulation, the Construction Industry Licensing Board — not the homeowner. DBPR’s own Construction Industry FAQ restates the same two-tier floor. The public licence search does not display the policy.

Source fact, California. BPC §7071.6 requires a contractor’s bond of $25,000 as a condition precedent to issuance, reinstatement, reactivation, renewal or continued maintenance of a licence (operative 1 January 2023, SB 607). CSLB’s Bond Requirements page, retrieved 5 September 2026, repeats the $25,000 figure and names the beneficiaries: consumers damaged by defective construction or licence-law violations, and employees who have not been paid wages. BPC §7071.6(b) then caps the surety’s aggregate liability on claims other than those of the §7071.5 beneficiaries at $7,500, with the rest reserved for those named beneficiaries. That is a bond-law fact a homeowner quoting “$25,000 of protection” will miss. CGL is not in §7071.6. CGL as a CSLB condition exists only for limited-liability-company licensees, under BPC §7071.19: $1 million aggregate for five or fewer members of record, plus $100,000 per additional member, not to exceed $5 million. CSLB’s consumer page is explicit that for everyone else, CGL “is not required.”

Source fact, Arizona. A.R.S. §32-1152 requires a surety bond or cash deposit before the registrar grants an original licence, and no licence may be renewed unless the bond or deposit is in full force. A.A.C. R4-9-112 sets the residential-general amounts at $9,000 below $750,000 contemplated annual volume and $15,000 at or above; residential specialty is $4,250 / $7,500 at a $375,000 volume break. Dual-licence bonds combine the commercial and residential schedules. Residential contractors also either participate in the recovery fund or post an additional $200,000 bond (A.R.S. §32-1152(C)). We retrieved no ROC rule that makes a CGL policy a condition of the licence. That cell is not verified, which is not a finding that Arizona contractors go uninsured.

Source fact, Nevada. NRS 624.270 requires a surety bond or cash deposit before the Board issues a licence, in an amount the Board fixes “with reference to the contractor’s financial and professional responsibility and the magnitude of the contractor’s operations,” not less than $1,000 and not more than $500,000. The bond is continuous; the surety’s aggregate liability is limited to the face amount irrespective of the number of years the bond is in force. NRS 624.256, separately, requires proof of industrial insurance covering employees, a self-insurance certificate, an association certificate, or an affidavit that the applicant has no employees, is not and does not intend to be a subcontractor for a principal contractor, and has not and does not intend to bid a job for one. Failure to maintain industrial insurance is cause to deny, revoke, suspend or refuse to renew, unless the affidavit applies. CGL is not in either section.

Source fact, Utah. Utah Code §58-55-302(2)(b) requires licensed contractors to file proof of public-liability insurance in coverage amounts and form established by rule. The published rule text we retrieved (R156-55a-302d, via Cornell LII) requires a certificate naming the Division as certificate holder, covering the scope of work, in force for the entire duration of active licensure, “in coverage amounts of at least $100,000 for each incident and $300,000 in total.” A 2026 amendment cycle — a 30 March 2026 change described in a May 2026 proposed-rule filing at commerce.utah.gov — moved to raise the total, first to $3 million and then, as proposed, to a commercially available $1 million per incident / $2 million total. We did not retrieve the adopted current-rule HTML from adminrules.utah.gov this session (the page did not return). Confirm the live dollar floor with DOPL. The existence of a CGL condition is not in doubt; the live number is in flux, and a frequently-changing requirement is labelled as one.

Source fact, North Carolina. NCLBGC’s contractor FAQ, retrieved 5 September 2026, answers “What are the insurance requirements?” with “There is not an insurance requirement for licensing. However, there may be insurance requirements for individual projects or for pulling building permits.” The same FAQ answers “Do I need to be bonded and insured?” by repeating that there is not an insurance or bonding requirement for the licence, and that bonds are required only if a surety bond is being used in lieu of the minimum financial requirements. 21 NCAC 12A .0204(e) sets those in-lieu bonds at $175,000 (limited), $500,000 (intermediate) and $1,000,000 (unlimited). They replace a working-capital showing. They are not CGL, and they are not a workers’-comp policy. The $40,000 project-value trigger that decides whether a NCLBGC licence is required at all is N.C.G.S. §87-1; that trigger is REM-04’s finding, restated here only so a kitchen that sits under it is not read as a licensed-and-therefore-insured job.

What the public can actually see on each board

A mandate and a public record are different facts. Florida requires CGL by statute and does not show the policy on the licence search. California does not require CGL of most licensees and shows the bond and the workers’-comp filing on every detail page we stored. A homeowner who treats the public lookup as a complete insurance file will be over-confident in California about CGL and under-informed in Florida about everything.

California, CSLB Check a License. A current detail page publishes business name, address, entity type, issue and expiry dates, status, classifications, the contractor’s bond (surety, number, amount — $25,000 on 4,816 of our 4,820 records), and workers’ compensation (named carrier and policy dates, or a filed exemption). CSLB’s data portal will optionally include bond and workers’-comp information on a bulk download. CGL is not on the standard record. CSLB’s consumer page tells you to ask for a certificate of insurance or the carrier’s name, and notes that “this information is also available on their license history page” — which, for CGL, is true of the LLC filings under §7071.19 and is not true of a sole-ownership B-licence. We stored CGL on zero of 4,820 California records, because the harvest did not have a CGL field to fill. That is a board-design fact, not a finding that California remodelers lack CGL.

Florida, DBPR Verify a Licensee (Board 06). The public search we used returns class (Certified Building, Certified Residential), status, qualifier, county. It does not return a CGL policy number, a workers’-comp carrier, or a bond. Fla. Stat. §489.115(5)(a) tells the board to verify insurance affidavits “based upon a random sample method.” The public is not in that sample. Our store records CGL as required_by_statute_as_a_condition_of_this_licence (claim_type primary_verified_alternate) on 6,936 of 7,130 Florida records — 4,580 Certified Building and 2,356 Certified Residential — and as unknown on 194 Certified Residential records. The flag is a reading of §489.115 against a live certificate. It is not a copy of the policy. The 194 unknowns are missing retrieval, not 194 uninsured residential contractors.

Arizona, ROC contractor search. The public Aura endpoint we queried (ARCP_ContractorSearch.getRecords) returned licence number, class, status, city. Bond, CGL and workers’ comp stored as unknown on all 4,932 records. ROC’s own bond-information page is a licensing-requirement page, not a per-licence lookup. A homeowner who wants the bond on a named firm has to use whatever the live ROC portal exposes on a detail view; we did not retrieve that field at harvest.

Nevada, NSCB Contractor Listing Search. The listing search returns licence, class, monetary limit. Bond is on some detail records: we stored a named surety and a face amount on 120 of 3,494 records (3.4%). The amounts on those 120 run from $2,000 (11 records) through $5,000 (23), $10,000 (31), $15,000 (30), $20,000 (7), $30,000 (12), $50,000 (3) and $100,000 (3), which is consistent with NRS 624.270’s $1,000–$500,000 Board-set range and is not a census of Nevada bonds. Industrial insurance and CGL were unknown on all 3,494. The 3,374 records with no bond on file in our store are a harvest gap on the detail page, not 3,374 unbonded licensees. NRS 624.270 makes the bond a condition of issuance.

Utah, DOPL. The public record we stored carries licence, classification, status and — uniquely in this snapshot — disciplinary actions (32 of 703 records). Bond, CGL and workers’ comp fields are absent from the schema of every Utah record. DOPL requires all three as licence conditions. The public lookup we harvested does not surface them. Confirm on a current DOPL detail page and on a certificate of insurance; do not read our empty fields as empty cover.

North Carolina, NCLBGC public search. Licence, limitation, classification. Bond, CGL and workers’ comp unknown on all 149 records, which is consistent with the Board’s statement that there is not an insurance requirement for licensing. A firm that posted a .0204(e) working-capital bond may have that fact somewhere in the Board’s files; it is not in our harvest.

Texas, TDLR. No GC register. San Antonio Contractor Connect and El Paso Accela are the public records we hold, and they show registration, not a named policy. TDI’s TXCOMP system will confirm workers’ comp for a named employer; it will not confirm CGL.

What our seven-state store actually shows

HyreRemodel calculation, not a board statistic. We opened every licence file under data/remodeling-data/licenses/ (22,183 records, measured 2026-09-05) and classified bond_status, workers_comp_status and general_liability_insurance as shown, required-by-rule, exempt, or not shown. “Shown” means a named surety, a named workers’-comp carrier, a filed exemption, or an explicit required-by-statute flag. An unknown or missing field is not a “no.”

The bars below are a picture of what the public record in our store contains, titled to these seven states. They are not a picture of who is insured. California dominates the “shown” counts because CSLB publishes bond and workers’ comp on the detail page and our harvest captured them. Florida dominates the “required-by-statute” CGL flag because we encoded §489.115 against the live certificate. Arizona, Utah and North Carolina dominate the empty cells because those boards’ public payloads, as harvested, did not carry the fields.

Across the seven-state store: 4,936 records show a named bond (4,816 California, all at $25,000; 120 Nevada, Board-set amounts). 2,139 show a named workers’-comp carrier (all California). 2,625 show a CSLB no-employee exemption (all California). 17,243 show neither a bond nor workers’ comp on the record we hold — 7,130 Florida, 4,932 Arizona, 3,374 Nevada, 955 Texas, 703 Utah, 149 North Carolina. Zero records store a named CGL carrier and policy number. 7,086 store a required-by-statute or required-by-rule CGL flag (6,936 Florida, 150 El Paso).

California is the only state in which a homeowner can, from the public register we stored, answer two of the three instrument questions without asking the contractor. Of 4,820 CSLB records: 4,816 show the $25,000 bond (four records have no bond_status object); 2,139 show a named carrier; 2,625 show a filed exemption; 56 have no workers_comp_status object. Of the bonded records, 2,623 combine bond plus exemption and 2,137 combine bond plus carrier; two records show an exemption without a bond object and two show a carrier without a bond object. CGL remains unpublished. HyreRemodel analysis: a California lookup that stops at “licensed and bonded” has confirmed the $25,000 surety and has confirmed nothing about the policy that would rebuild the kitchen.

What the stored public record contains, by instrument, measured 2026-09-05. A zero bar is a board that did not publish the field into our harvest, or a harvest that did not request the detail page — not a census of uninsured firms.

Disciplinary_actions in this snapshot is populated only for Utah. An empty disciplinary field in another state is missing retrieval, not a clean record. The same rule applies, with more force, to insurance fields.

How to read a certificate of insurance

A certificate of insurance is the document a homeowner can actually use, and it is the document most homeowners are handed as a photocopy of a photocopy. The standard US form is ACORD 25, Certificate of Liability Insurance. It is a snapshot, prepared by an agent or the insurer, of policies that existed when the form was produced. It is not the policy. It does not amend the policy. In a growing number of states the form itself says, in the header, that it is issued as a matter of information only and confers no rights on the certificate holder. Read it that way.

Date and producer. The certificate date is the day it was prepared, not the day cover began. A certificate dated last spring, handed over for a job that starts this month, is a historical document. The producer (agent or broker) is who to call. Call them. Do not accept a certificate the contractor generated from a PDF editor.

Named insured. This must match the legal name on the contract and, where a licence exists, the name on the licence. A policy issued to “Mike’s Kitchens LLC” does not cover work contracted with “Mike’s Kitchens,” a sole proprietorship, unless an endorsement says so. In California, match it to the CSLB business name. In Florida, match it to the DBPR qualifier’s business organisation. In Texas, match it to the city registration and the secretary-of-state entity.

Insurer and policy number. A real CGL policy has a carrier admitted or surplus-lined in that state, and a policy number. “Self-insured” on a CGL line, with no excess policy, is not a CGL policy. Workers’ comp should name a licensed workers’-comp carrier, a state fund, or a certified self-insurer — or, in Texas, it may lawfully name nothing because the employer is a non-subscriber. If the contractor claims a Texas non-subscriber status, that is a TDI fact you can check; it is not a CGL fact.

Limits, read as three numbers. Each occurrence is what one incident can pay. The general aggregate is what the policy can pay for the year across premises and operations. The products-completed operations aggregate is what it can pay after the crew has left — the leak that shows up in November from a June job. A certificate that shows $1,000,000 each occurrence and $0 completed operations is answering a different question from the one a remodel asks. Florida’s licensing floor of $300,000 / $50,000 for a building contractor is occurrence-and-property-damage language from a 2007 board rule; it is not a completed-operations figure, and it is not a recommendation.

Effective and expiration dates. The job must sit inside the policy period. A policy that expires on Friday, on a job that runs through next month, is a policy that will have to be renewed, and renewals fail. Ask for a certificate dated inside the week you sign, and a second one the week work starts if those weeks are apart.

Description of operations / locations. If the box is blank, the certificate is describing a policy, not this job. If it names a different address, it may be describing a different risk. Additional-insured endorsements are often limited to the operations described here.

Cancellation. The form’s cancellation box is frequently a “will endeavor to mail 10 days’ notice” sentence. That is not a promise the insurer will tell you before the policy dies. The only reliable cancellation notice is an endorsement the insurer has actually issued, or a call to the carrier with the policy number in hand.

HyreRemodel recommendation, not a source fact: ask the insurer or the producer to email the certificate to you, not through the contractor. Confirm the policy number with the carrier. If the carrier will not confirm, the certificate is not doing the work you need. San Antonio and El Paso both require the city to be listed as certificate holder on the municipal registration; that listing protects the city’s permit process, not your kitchen, and it lapses when the policy does.

What “additional insured” means — and what a certificate holder is not

Two boxes on an ACORD 25 get used as if they were one. They are not.

Certificate holder is the person or entity the agent typed into the bottom-left box so that a copy of the certificate would be addressed to them. Being a certificate holder gives you a piece of paper. It does not make you an insured. It does not give you the right to a defence. It does not require the insurer to notify you of cancellation unless a separate endorsement says so. Florida’s rule 61G4-15.003 requires the certificate holder on the licensing affidavit’s certificate to be the Department of Business and Professional Regulation / Construction Industry Licensing Board. That listing is for the Board. It does nothing for the homeowner.

Additional insured is a person or organisation the policy has been amended to cover, for liability arising out of the named insured’s operations (and, if the endorsement reaches that far, completed operations). The amendment is an endorsement to the policy, not a line of type on a certificate. The certificate may say “additional insured” in the description box; if the endorsement is not on the policy, the certificate is describing a fiction. In the ISO commercial-general-liability forms most US contractors use, the two endorsements homeowners actually need distinguished are the ongoing-operations form (commonly CG 20 10) and the completed-operations form (commonly CG 20 37). Ongoing operations covers you while the crew is in the house. Completed operations covers you after they have left, for damage arising out of the work. A certificate that lists you as additional insured “as respects ongoing operations” is silent on the leak in November.

Primary and non-contributory, and a waiver of subrogation, are further endorsements, not default settings. Primary and non-contributory is an attempt to make the contractor’s CGL pay before the homeowner’s own policy. A waiver of subrogation is an attempt to stop the contractor’s insurer chasing the homeowner after it pays. Neither is created by being named as certificate holder. Neither is created by a state licensing floor. They are contract terms, negotiated or copied from a bid package, and they exist only if the insurer has issued the endorsement.

HyreRemodel analysis: the additional-insured request is the point at which a licensing minimum and a homeowner’s actual protection diverge most sharply. California does not require CGL of most licensees, so there is no CSLB form that names you. Florida requires CGL of the licensee and names the Board as certificate holder, so the public record, such as it is, names the Board and not you. San Antonio names the city. In every one of those jurisdictions, the only way you become an additional insured on the policy that would pay your claim is to ask, in the contract, and to see the endorsement, not the certificate’s description box. A contractor who refuses is not necessarily uninsured. They are refusing to extend their policy to you. That is information. It is not a licensing violation in North Carolina, and it is not a licensing violation in Texas, and in California it is not a CSLB violation for a non-LLC. It may still be a reason not to hire them.

Method

Research question: for residential general contracting, what do state licensing boards (and the municipal registers that sit under Texas) require as a condition of the credential by way of commercial general liability, workers’ compensation and a licence bond; at what limit; whether proof is filed with the board; and whether the public can see it. A second question, computed from our store: on the licence records we hold, how often is a bond, a workers’-comp filing, or neither actually present as a stored field.

Requirements were recorded in three states, not two: verified required at the primary source, verified not required as a condition of the credential at the primary source, and not verified. An unchecked cell is never rendered as a “no.” Employment-law workers’ compensation is noted in prose where it is the unusual case (Texas, elective) or where a board itself distinguishes it from the licence (North Carolina). It is not merged into the matrix.

Store-derived counts come from a full pass over 22,183 JSON licence files in data/remodeling-data/licenses/, measured 2026-09-05. A bond is “shown” when bond_status carries a carrier, number or amount (California shape) or a non-empty value other than required_by_the_issuing_rule (Nevada shape). Workers’ comp is “shown” as a carrier when workers_comp_status.carrier is populated, and as an exemption when exempt is true. A required-by-rule CGL flag is not counted as a named policy. Texas San Antonio general_liability_on_file booleans are reported separately from named policies.

No claim on this page is taken from an insurance-agency round-up. Dollar floors are from the statute, the board rule, the board’s own FAQ, or the municipal page. Utah’s live CGL dollar floor is labelled in flux: the published rule text we retrieved still states $100,000 / $300,000; a 2026 amendment cycle proposed $1 million / $2 million; we did not retrieve the adopted current-rule HTML and we will not pick a number from a blog.