Florida commercial general liability,
written for what the business actually does.

Contractors have a floor set by the licensing board. Section 489.115 requires every certified or registered contractor to attest that public liability and property damage insurance is in place in amounts set by the Construction Industry Licensing Board. The board's rule sets $300,000 liability and $50,000 property damage for general and building contractors, and $100,000 and $25,000 for residential contractors and most other trades. Those are the legal minimums. No general contractor, plan room or municipality we deal with accepts less than $1,000,000 per occurrence on a certificate, so the statute sets the floor and the contract sets the real number. Employees are a separate policy. The CGL form excludes injury to your own employees. Florida workers compensation is required at four or more employees for most businesses and at one employee in the construction trades under section 440.02. A lot of first-year owners ask us for GL thinking it covers the crew. It does not, and a certificate that shows GL only tells a general contractor exactly that. Fault is split, and the clock is short. Since the 2023 tort reform (HB 837), a plaintiff who is more than 50 percent at fault recovers nothing under section 768.81, and a negligence suit has to be filed within two years under section 95.11. That changed how premises claims get argued and settled in Florida. Cameras, incident reports and maintenance records now decide more claims than they used to; we wrote about a plaza claim that ended on parking lot video in this post. Lighting is the other half of that file: a dark lot is how a parking lot robbery turns into a negligent security claim against the property owner. Surplus lines is a normal part of Florida GL. New ventures, contractors with no loss history, bars, auto service and anything with a claim behind it often cannot find an admitted carrier here. The policy then comes from a surplus lines carrier through a wholesaler, with state taxes and fees added and, very often, a classification limitation endorsement attached. That endorsement restricts coverage to the operations listed on the declarations, which is why the application has to list every operation, not the main one.

Section 768.0755 sets the proof in a Florida slip and fall. A person who falls on a transitory foreign substance in a business must prove the business had actual or constructive knowledge of it and should have acted. Constructive knowledge can be shown two ways: the substance was there long enough that reasonable care would have found it, or the condition happened regularly and was foreseeable. For a plaza owner that is a maintenance log and a sweep schedule; for the carrier it is the difference between a defended claim and a paid one. Section 725.06 caps what a contract can shift. In a construction contract, a clause making one party indemnify another for the other's own negligence is enforceable only if it carries a monetary cap that bears a reasonable commercial relationship to the contract, stated in the bid documents, and an owner-protective cap is not less than $1,000,000 per occurrence unless the parties agree otherwise. The general liability policy's contractual liability coverage follows that clause; a contractor who signs an uncapped one has signed something the statute does not enforce and the policy may not cover. Two tenants, from this office's files. On a Lakeland plaza at its January 2025 renewal, a restaurant tenant with no liability insurance of its own put the landlord's carrier first in line to defend a claim, and the landlord's umbrella premium more than doubled the same year for unrelated reasons; the full account is on commercial umbrella insurance in Florida. On a Sarasota strip center's October 2026 general liability renewal, the carrier wrote the rule into the quote itself: tenants must carry commercial general liability with limits equal to or greater than the landlord's and name the landlord as additional insured, with certificates on file. A landlord who cannot produce those certificates at renewal is the landlord whose quote changes.

Every one of these is anonymized from this office's 2026 files and reported as the carriers quoted it. The pattern across them is the same as the safety consultant above: the premium follows the class and the wording, and the wording follows what the application said.

A construction safety consultant came to us with a quote from another agent written through an instant small-business program on one class code: safety consulting. His firm actually does three things. Safety consulting for contractor clients, site safety officer work with stop-work authority on live job sites, and placing safety staff on contractor sites. The cheap quote carried a classification limitation. Two of his three operations, the ones with real injury exposure, were not on it.

We took the account to the surplus lines market through a wholesaler. Several markets declined it outright. The wholesaler said most markets wanted $10,000 or more a year for full injury coverage on that class. We placed professional liability with Gemini Insurance Company, a W. R. Berkley carrier, at $1,000,000 per claim with defense paid outside the limit, with every service he performs named in the wording. It cost more than $2,700. It also covers what he does. The full file, with both quotes side by side, is in the cheap quote with one class code, and the paid review we do on policies other agents wrote is on the insurance consulting page.

• Legal entity name, FEIN, and the address of every location
• Every operation the business performs, including the side work that brings in ten percent of revenue
• Annual gross receipts, payroll by class, and the cost of subcontracted work
• Any lease, contract or bid that names required limits and additional insured wording
• Current policy and five years of loss runs, or a statement that there are none
• Licenses held, and for contractors, the trades you are licensed in

Send it through the commercial application or email the current policy to dennis@hendricksonins.com. If you are not sure which application fits, start here.