Water is the whole story. Plumbing has the highest claim frequency of any mechanical trade, and the losses land on other people's property.
A plumbing contractor in North Carolina typically needs general liability with substantial completed operations limits, workers' compensation at three or more employees, commercial auto, and a tools and equipment floater. The defining exposure is water damage to property other than your own work — a supply line that fails overnight in an occupied building routinely produces a claim many times the value of the original invoice.
The engine of a plumbing program. The resulting water damage from a failed connection is exactly what this coverage is for, even though the failed connection itself generally is not.
Required at three or more employees in NC, four in SC. Trenching and confined-space work draw carrier attention.
Service vans and any trailer-mounted equipment. NC minimums moved to 50/100/50 in July 2025.
Drain machines, cameras, jetters, and locators — high-value, highly portable, and a frequent theft target off job sites.
Standard GL excludes damage to property in your care. When you take a customer's fixture or system into your control, that exclusion can bite. It is addressable, but only if someone looks at it.
Sewer backup, fuel line work, and mold following a water loss all touch the pollution exclusion on a standard policy.
A supply line that lets go on a Friday evening in a three-story building produces damage to flooring, drywall, cabinetry, tenant contents, and often business income — while the fitting itself costs a few dollars. The claim is against your completed operations coverage, and it can arrive well after the job closed. This is why limits that look generous relative to your revenue are often merely adequate relative to your exposure.
Soldering in an occupied structure carries the same fire exposure as any other torch work. Carriers increasingly ask for a hot work permit procedure with a post-work fire watch, and a fire loss without documented procedures is where coverage arguments begin.
Sewer backup and the mold that follows a delayed water remediation are both routinely caught by the pollution exclusion. A plumbing contractor without contractors pollution liability has a real gap in the class of loss they are most likely to have.
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 plumbing contractors through the State Board of Examiners of Plumbing, Heating and Fire Sprinkler Contractors. South Carolina requires a commercial mechanical license above $10,000 in project value and a residential specialty license above $500 — thresholds low enough that NC contractors picking up work in York County are frequently caught out.
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.