The thing most likely to end a roofing company isn't a fall.

General liability is the foundation, and for a roofer the part that matters most is completed operations, because roofing claims almost always arrive after the crew has left. Workers compensation covers employee injury and is the coverage carriers scrutinize hardest on this trade because of fall exposure. Tools and equipment, written as inland marine, covers your own compressors, nail guns, ladders and lifts, which general liability does not. Commercial auto covers trucks, dump trailers and anything with a ladder rack. Beyond those, a commercial umbrella adds limits over liability and auto and is frequently required by contract, and installation floater or builders risk questions arise on new construction work.

There is one more that almost no roofing company carries and probably should consider, which is a management or professional liability form. General liability answers for bodily injury and property damage. It does not answer for a regulatory complaint, an allegation that you misrepresented a contract price, or a dispute about how you handled a customer's insurance claim, and on this trade those are realistic exposures.

Because carriers are pricing several difficult exposures at once, not because roofers are careless. Work at height produces falls, which are both frequent and severe, and severity is what drives workers compensation pricing. Hot work such as torch applied systems introduces fire exposure to a finished building. Roofing sits directly against the weather, so a single hailstorm can generate a concentrated wave of claims across an entire book at the same time, and correlated losses of that kind are exactly what underwriters price cautiously. Work on an existing structure means water intrusion and damage to the building below are always in play. And the trade has high labor turnover and heavy use of subcontracted crews, which complicates both underwriting and audit.

The practical consequence is that many standard carriers decline roofing outright and the work is frequently placed in specialty or surplus lines markets with different forms and different exclusions. Appetite still varies enormously between markets, and the same operation can be treated very differently depending on the new construction versus repair split, steepness and height, whether hot work is performed, crew experience and loss history.

No, and this is the single most important compliance point for a roofing company in this state. Arkansas law defines an adjuster in terms of investigating and negotiating claim settlements on behalf of the insurer, and provides that no person may adjust claims as an adjuster without licensure. Sources disagree about whether Arkansas has any licensing route for someone to adjust claims on behalf of a policyholder at all, and this page does not attempt to resolve that question. The answer for a roofer is the same either way. Either no such license exists in Arkansas, or it exists and you do not hold it. Either way, negotiating a homeowner's claim on their behalf is not something a roofing contractor can do.

There is a practical line worth understanding. Providing the property owner with an estimate for the repair or replacement is your job. Conferring with the adjuster about the damage after the owner has filed the claim, and submitting documentation of what the work actually requires, is generally understood as different from negotiating the settlement on the owner's behalf. Where exactly that line sits in a given interaction is a question for the Arkansas Insurance Department and for counsel, not for a marketing page, and it is worth asking before you build a sales process around it.

Treat that as prohibited and build your pricing so the question never arises. The deductible is the policyholder's share of the loss, and it is the mechanism by which the policy makes the insured carry part of the risk. A contractor who absorbs, waives, rebates or discounts it while billing the insurer the full contract price is representing a price to the insurer that nobody actually paid, and that misrepresentation is the problem regardless of how the arrangement is described. Offering it as a discount, a rebate, a free upgrade or an advertising allowance does not change the substance of what has happened.

The consequences are not limited to the contractor either. An insurer that discovers it may decline the claim or take action on the policy, which puts your customer in a worse position than if you had never offered. This is also an area where enforcement attention has increased generally. Confirm the current Arkansas position with the Arkansas Insurance Department or with counsel before adopting any practice of this kind, and note that your general liability policy will not respond to a regulatory action or an allegation of misrepresentation.

Generally not the cost of fixing the roof itself, and this is the most common misunderstanding on the trade. General liability is not a workmanship warranty. Forms commonly exclude damage to your own work arising out of that work, which means going back to repair a defective installation is ordinarily your cost rather than the insurer's. What may be covered is resulting damage to other property. If the leak damages drywall, insulation, flooring or the customer's contents, that damage can be covered even though redoing the roof is not, depending on the form and on how the subcontractor exception is written.

Two related points matter a great deal on this trade. Completed operations coverage is what responds after the crew has left the job, and since roofing claims almost always surface later, it is the part of the policy that matters most to you. Confirm it is present, confirm it stays present through any carrier change, and understand that a gap in it can leave finished work unprotected years after you were paid for it.

Not automatically, and this is one of the most common declined roofing claims. Hot work, meaning torch applied systems, kettles, welding, soldering or anything producing an open flame or significant heat, is frequently excluded on roofing forms or made subject to conditions. Where it is covered, carriers commonly impose requirements such as a written hot work permit process, a fire watch maintained for a stated period after work stops, extinguishers within a set distance, and restrictions on how late in the day hot work may be performed. Those conditions are not decoration. Failing to meet one is exactly what gets examined after a fire.

The practical steps are straightforward. Confirm in writing whether hot work is covered at all on your policy. If it is, get the conditions in plain language and make sure the crew actually follows them, including on the last job of the day when everyone wants to go home. And if you have moved away from torch applied systems, tell your agent, because it can change both your appetite and your price.

They are very likely to be treated as your payroll at audit, and roofing is the trade where this causes the most damage because subcontracted crews are so common. At audit, payments to subcontractors who cannot produce evidence of their own coverage are commonly reclassified as payroll and charged to your workers compensation policy at your class rate, which on roofing is among the highest there is. That bill arrives months after the season ended and the money was spent.

There is a second and more serious version of the problem. Arkansas workers compensation provisions can reach a prime contractor for the employees of an uninsured subcontractor, so an injured worker who was never on your payroll can become your claim. A fall by an uninsured crew member is therefore not somebody else's problem. It is yours. The discipline that prevents both is the same. Collect certificates before the crew starts rather than after, confirm both general liability and workers compensation, ask for the additional insured endorsement rather than only the certificate, and keep the file, because audit and claims both look backwards.

Sometimes, and it depends on how the damage happened and on how the form treats your work. Water intrusion during a tear off is the classic roofing loss. A roof is opened, weather arrives sooner or harder than forecast, and the interior takes the damage. Where that is a covered occurrence, the damage to the building's interior and to the owner's contents is generally third party property damage of the sort general liability is designed to address, while the cost of completing or redoing the roof itself sits under the damage to your work exclusion.

Several things affect whether it responds well. Whether the form treats water intrusion during construction favorably. Whether there is any exclusion aimed at open roof conditions or at failure to protect the work. Whether tarping and weather monitoring practices can be shown, since a carrier will ask. And on new construction, whether builders risk exists and who is named on it, because the structure under construction is not a general liability exposure at all. Discuss your actual tear off practice with your agent rather than assuming the form contemplates it.

It affects your sales because it determines what your customer will actually be paid, which determines whether the job you quoted can be funded. Arkansas addressed roof loss settlement through a bulletin issued by the Insurance Department. As described in the Commissioner's market report to the legislature, a mandatory endorsement is permitted, with approved notice that the insurer must file, allowing actual cash value loss settlement on replacement cost policies for wind and hail damaged roofs once a roof reaches age seven. In practical terms that means a homeowner with an older roof may receive a depreciated payment rather than the full cost of replacement, and the gap between that payment and your quote is money the customer has to find.

That is why quoting a job without knowing whether the customer's policy settles on a replacement cost or actual cash value basis produces so many stalled projects. Two cautions. This is general information about personal lines policies rather than advice about any particular policy, and the material we can verify addresses homeowners coverage rather than commercial property, so do not assume it applies the same way to a commercial roof. Confirm current requirements with the Arkansas Insurance Department, and encourage customers to read their own declarations page.

Start the commercial quote form or call (479) 286-1066, and expect a fuller submission than other trades require, because roofing is placed on the strength of the detail.

Useful to have: your legal entity and years in business, an honest split between residential and commercial work and between new construction and repair or replacement, your estimated annual payroll and revenue, employee count, whether you use subcontracted crews and roughly what share of the work they perform, whether you perform any hot work and what your permit and fire watch practice is, the maximum height and steepness you work at, your fall protection program and any documented safety training, a vehicle schedule with drivers and their records, a tools and equipment list with values, how much of your work comes from storm response and whether you travel outside your normal area for it, and loss runs for the last several years. If a general contractor or property owner has given you insurance requirements, send that document too. On this class the completeness of the file genuinely changes which markets will look at it.