Built for the exposures that actually generate HVAC claims — hot work, water, refrigerant, and equipment sitting on a job site overnight.
An HVAC or mechanical contractor in North Carolina typically needs general liability, workers' compensation once you regularly employ three or more people, commercial auto for service trucks, an installation floater for equipment staged on a job site before it is accepted, and a tools and equipment floater. Contractors pollution liability is worth adding, because refrigerant and combustion by-products fall under the pollution exclusion on a standard general liability policy.
Covers third-party bodily injury and property damage arising from your work — including the resulting damage when an installation fails. Completed operations coverage is what responds when a job you finished last year causes a loss.
Required in NC at three or more employees, SC at four. Also the certificate every general contractor will demand before you start.
Service trucks, vans, and any trailer. NC minimum liability limits rose to 50/100/50 on July 1, 2025, and most commercial contracts require far more than the minimum.
Covers the rooftop unit or air handler that is on site but not yet installed and accepted. This is the gap that catches mechanical contractors most often — the equipment is too big to be a hand tool and not yet the building owner's property.
Gauges, recovery machines, vacuum pumps, and the contents of the van. Written on an inland marine form so theft off a job site is covered, which a property policy alone will not do.
Refrigerant release, carbon monoxide, fuel oil, and mold following a condensate failure are all pollution under a standard GL policy's exclusion. If your work touches combustion or refrigerant, this is not optional coverage.
Brazing and torch work on a customer's property is the highest-severity thing most mechanical contractors do. Some carriers exclude hot work outright, others require a written hot work permit procedure with a fire watch for a set period after the torch goes off. A fire loss where you cannot show a permit process is where coverage disputes start. Ask what your policy actually says — many contractors assume they are covered and are not.
Condensate lines, hydronic systems, and coil failures produce the frequency claims. A drain line that backs up over a weekend in a multi-tenant building generates a claim against your completed operations coverage months after your invoice was paid, and the damage is to everything except the unit you installed.
A combustion appliance installed or serviced incorrectly can produce a bodily injury claim of a severity nothing else in the trade approaches. Standard general liability treats CO as a pollutant and excludes it. This is the single strongest argument for contractors pollution liability in the mechanical trades.
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.
North Carolina licenses heating and air conditioning contractors through the State Board of Examiners of Plumbing, Heating and Fire Sprinkler Contractors, separately from the general contractor license — and a project valued at $40,000 or more may pull a general contractor license requirement on top of the trade license.
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.