Your premium is decided less by what your own crews do than by how well you control the paperwork on everyone you hire.
A general contractor in North Carolina typically needs general liability rated on both payroll and subcontracted cost, workers' compensation at three or more employees, commercial auto, builder's risk on projects under construction, and an umbrella to satisfy contract requirements. North Carolina requires a general contractor license on any project valued at $40,000 or more; South Carolina's commercial threshold is $10,000.
Rated on payroll and subcontracted cost. Completed operations is essential and should stay in force well past project close.
Covers the structure under construction against fire, wind, theft, and vandalism. Written per project or on a reporting form if you run several at once.
Required at three or more employees in NC, four in SC — and the coverage that uninsured subs get charged back to.
Company trucks plus the liability that follows employees driving their own vehicles on company business, which is a gap most GCs don't realize they have.
Nearly every commercial owner, developer, or municipality requires $2M–$5M in total limits before issuing a contract.
The endorsements that make your certificate acceptable to the owner. Getting the right form — and the right wording — is what keeps a job from being held up.
For a general contractor, insurance cost is largely a function of documentation discipline. Three practices control it:
We review subcontractor agreements and certificate requirements as part of placing the account. It is not glamorous work, and it is worth more to a GC's bottom line than shaving a few points off the rate.
North Carolina requires a general contractor license for any single project with a total value of $40,000 or more, a threshold that rose from $30,000 effective October 1, 2023. Splitting a project into phases to stay under the limit is a well-known enforcement target and does not work.
South Carolina is considerably stricter: a commercial general contractor license is required above $10,000, a residential builder license above $5,000, and a residential specialty license above $500. Contractors crossing from Gaston County into York County routinely underestimate this.
This is the exposure that surprises contractors most often, and it is worth understanding before you have a claim rather than after.
A general liability policy is not a warranty on your workmanship. The standard form contains exclusions — insurance people call them j(5) and j(6) — that remove coverage for damage to the particular part of the property you were working on when the damage happened. If you install a system incorrectly and the only damage is to that system, that is generally your cost to fix, not the carrier's.
What the policy is built to cover is the resulting damage to everything else. Install a unit wrong, and the repair to your work may be excluded while the water damage to the ceiling, the flooring, and the tenant's property below is exactly what the policy is there for. That distinction is why the completed operations portion of your limit matters as much as the per-occurrence limit, and why letting completed operations lapse when you retire a job is a bad idea — claims on finished work show up years later.
Two numbers decide whether you are legally required to carry workers' compensation, and they are different on each side of the state line:
That third number is the one that costs people money. Being under the statutory threshold does not mean you can skip coverage in practice. Every general contractor and property manager you work for will require a certificate showing workers' compensation before they let you on site, and if you can't produce one, your payroll gets charged back to their policy at audit. They will notice, and they will stop calling.
Licensed in five states. We write this coverage across North and South Carolina — our primary markets — as well as Tennessee, Virginia, and Florida.