Certificate of insurance (COI)

Your sub emailed a certificate of insurance and wants a crew on your site Monday. Before you file it and let them start, be clear about what is in your hand. It is a one-page summary, typed by someone at their agency, of a policy you have never seen. It reports coverage. It does not create any, and it does not prove you are protected.

What you are actually holding

Someone at your sub's agency opened a policy file and typed the numbers into a template. No underwriter signed it. No carrier reviewed it before it left. The certificate is a transcription, and your copy is only as current as the file it was transcribed from that morning.

That is not an accusation against anybody. It is how the document is designed to work, and the form announces it in its own header: issued as a matter of information only. Three kinds of paper arrive when somebody asks an agency for “a COI”, and they are not interchangeable.

• ACORD 25 — Certificate of Liability Insurance. The liability certificate: general liability, automobile, umbrella and workers' compensation, in rows. This is almost always what a subcontractor sends you, and how to read it box by box is a page of its own.
• A property form — ACORD 24, 27 or 28. These report coverage on a building and are normally issued for a lender or a landlord, not for the contractor who hired the crew. A sub who sends one instead of an ACORD 25 has sent the wrong form, usually because nobody said what the request was for. Which form is which is worth two minutes before you file one as proof of liability cover.
• A binder (commonly an ACORD 75). This one is not evidence at all — it is actual temporary coverage, bound under the agent's own authority, and it is the only document in this list that grants anything. Its face carries a short date, and it was bound before anyone attached the endorsements your subcontract asked for. Diary that date the day the binder arrives, and treat it as a crew-can-start document rather than a filed one.

The one thing a certificate proves

It proves this, and only this: on the issue date printed at the top, a policy carrying those numbers appeared to exist. Not that it still exists. Not that it reaches your project. Not that it reaches you.

The form is unusually candid about its own limits. In the ACORD 25's own words, the certificate “does not affirmatively or negatively amend, extend or alter the coverage afforded by the policies below.” Read that again slowly. The document you were about to rely on is telling you, in print, that it changes nothing about the coverage it describes.

So a certificate is a starting point for questions, not an answer to any of them. Everything on it is checkable elsewhere — in the policy paperwork the agency already holds.

Four things it cannot prove

Each of these has caught a contractor who did exactly what the certificate asked of them.

• That coverage is still in force. A policy can be canceled for non-payment the morning after the certificate is issued, and nothing about the PDF in your folder changes. What the form promises about being told is thinner than it sounds — notice of cancellation is where that promise gets read closely.
• That you are covered by it. Your name in the holder box means a copy was addressed to you. Being covered is additional insured status, it lives on the policy, and it arrives by a different document entirely.
• That the endorsements it references exist. The ADDL INSD and SUBR WVD columns hold a Y or an N typed by the agency. That is a claim about a document. It is not the document, and a claim can be out of date, optimistic, or simply carried forward from last year's file.
• That the limits are intact. The general aggregate caps the whole policy year across every job that sub works, and the form prints that ceiling rather than what is left under it. A claim on somebody else's site can eat half of it and nothing on your page moves. The number is a ceiling, not a balance, which is the whole argument for a per-project aggregate.

Who the four parties on it are

Four parties are boxed on the page and only one of them is you. Mixing them up is the most expensive way to misread this document.

• [The named insured](/glossary/named-insured). The legal entity whose policy this is. It has to match the entity that signed your subcontract exactly — the Inc, the LLC, the DBA, all of it. A sub who operates two entities will send whichever certificate is on their desk, and the one on their desk is frequently the wrong company.
• The producer. The agency named in the upper-left box, which issued the certificate and holds the policy file. This is the party you email when you need proof of anything. Not your sub — their agent.
• The insurers affording coverage. Upper-right, lettered A through F, each with a NAIC number. These are the carriers — the only parties on the sheet who will ever pay a claim. The letter in front of a coverage row says which of them wrote that policy, so a general liability row and a workers' compensation row carrying different letters mean two insurers and two renewals to chase.
• The certificate holder. You, bottom-left. It means a copy was addressed to your company. At best it buys a notification courtesy, and even that is soft: the cancellation clause says notice will be delivered in accordance with the policy provisions, which can amount to no direct notice to you at all.

A fifth party is implied all over the form and given no box of its own: the additional insured. A Y in the ADDL INSD column, and a name typed into the description band, both point at that party without identifying it the way the four boxes above identify theirs. The status itself sits on the sub's policy, which is why a certificate can only ever report it. The difference between holder and additional insured is the one to read in full before you rely on either.

The three documents that do prove something

When the certificate is not enough — and for anything your subcontract names by form number, it is never enough — there are exactly three documents worth asking for. Ask the issuing agent, not the sub. That agent has no relationship with you and no idea who Sealinn is, so there is a page written for them you can point at if the request reads as odd from their side.

• The endorsement. The policy page that grants one specific thing: additional insured (CG 20 10 for ongoing operations, CG 20 37 for completed operations), waiver of subrogation (CG 24 04 on general liability, WC 00 03 13 on workers' compensation, or your state bureau's own version of it), or primary and non-contributory wording. Ask every time your subcontract names the grant, which for those forms means every job.
• The declarations page. Ask for this when the certificate's numbers look wrong, when the named insured is ambiguous, or when you would rather not take a checkbox's word for an endorsement. It comes from the carrier rather than from the agency, and it names the forms actually attached to the policy — so it settles all three of those arguments on one page, which the certificate cannot do on any of them.
• A full policy copy. The coverage form plus every endorsement and exclusion — the only document that shows what has been carved out. Worth asking for on a large or high-hazard scope, or when a declarations page lists an exclusion you do not recognize. Whether you can compel one is a question for your attorney and the subcontract you signed.

How you ask decides what comes back. “Proof we're additional insured” usually returns another certificate, because that is what an agency can produce in thirty seconds. A request for the CG 20 37 endorsement page returns the CG 20 37 endorsement page. Name the form number — every form a subcontract normally asks for is listed by number, including what each edition date changes.

Hi [Agent name],

We're the general contractor on [Project] and we have [Subcontractor]'s certificate dated [date]. Before their crew mobilizes we need two things out of the policy file, rather than a reissued certificate.

1. The declarations page for the general liability policy — named insured, policy term, limits and the schedule of forms as the carrier issued them.

2. Copies of the endorsements our subcontract requires: CG 20 10 and CG 20 37 for additional insured, CG 24 04 for the general liability waiver of subrogation, and WC 00 03 13 on the workers' compensation policy.

If any of those endorsements has not been issued, please tell us plainly — we'd rather sort it out this week than after a claim.

Thanks,
[Your name]
[Your company] · [Phone]

What to do with the certificate in front of you

The document still has a job. It tells you what to check and who to ask. The order that finds problems fastest — and what to say to the agent when a line fails — is its own checklist, and that is the page to open with a certificate actually in front of you. Deciding what to require in the first place happened earlier still, before this document was ever issued.

Two moves belong on this page instead, because both follow from the snapshot problem rather than from the form itself:

1. 1Check the holder box names the entity you actually trade as, at the address you use now. An old company name, or a job trailer you gave up last spring, means the agency copied this from a file nobody has opened in a year. A stale address is a fair warning about every other field above it.
2. 2Diary the earliest expiry date on the page, then re-verify at renewal instead of re-filing. A renewal certificate is a new document rather than an updated one: possibly a new carrier, possibly different limits, and by default no endorsements carried across. Renewal is where a sub who was compliant in March quietly stops being compliant in September, and nobody is told.