Waiver of subrogation

The claim that circles back to you

Your subcontract says your sub must carry a waiver of subrogation in your favor, and now you have to decide whether what they sent satisfies it. Start with what the requirement is actually buying. A carpenter employed by your sub falls on your site. The sub's workers' compensation insurer pays their medical bills and their lost wages, because that is what the policy is for. Then that insurer goes looking for someone to bill.

Your sub is not the target. Workers' compensation is that worker's exclusive remedy against their own employer, and no insurer sets out to recover from the policyholder it just paid for. So the carrier looks past your sub at whoever else was on that jobsite. It looks at you.

That is subrogation: an insurer that has paid a claim takes over the recovery its payment bought, and pursues whoever it believes caused the loss. On a comp claim that recovery is the injured worker's own claim against everyone except their employer. The carrier pursues it directly, or recovers out of it as a lien, depending on the state. A waiver of subrogation is that insurer agreeing in advance, in writing, not to do it to a named party. You require one so that party is you.

Without it, an injury to your sub's own employee, doing your sub's work, can arrive at your office as a lawsuit from their insurer, for money it has already paid out. Your carrier defends that. The defense costs and any settlement land in your loss history, on a claim where nobody from your company touched the tool. The same logic runs on your sub's general liability policy — a fire damages equipment, the sub's insurer pays, and then it goes looking for a cause. All of this presupposes your sub carries the policy at all: a sub who tells you they are exempt from workers' comp has nothing for a waiver to sit on.

Two waivers, two policies, two form numbers

This is where the requirement most often half-lands. You ask for a waiver of subrogation. The certificate comes back with a “Y” beside the General Liability row, the box is ticked, the file is closed. But the general liability waiver is not the comp waiver. They are separate endorsements, on separate policies, frequently written by separate carriers, and one has no bearing on the other.

• CG 24 04, “Waiver of Transfer of Rights of Recovery Against Others To Us.” The ISO endorsement on the general liability policy. It answers the claims that policy pays: the fire, the flooded floor below, the damaged structure next door, and an injury to somebody who is not the sub's own employee.
• WC 00 03 13, “Waiver of Our Right to Recover From Others.” NCCI's countrywide workers' compensation endorsement. It answers the injured-employee claim, which is where subrogation against a general contractor most often begins. A few states run their own forms instead of NCCI's: California issues WC 04 03 06, Texas WC 42 03 04. Ask their agent for the version the state of issue uses.

If you only ever chase one, chase the comp one. The GL waiver is easy to get and rarely the one that saves you. Your sub's employee getting hurt is the everyday event on a construction site, and a comp insurer hunting a third party to bill is what routinely follows it. Employers liability is Part B of that same comp policy, and the waiver is a different lever on the same document. The two get confused constantly.

Write both form numbers into your subcontract. A clause demanding “a waiver of subrogation on all policies” is answerable with one endorsement and an argument. A clause naming CG 24 04 and “WC 00 03 13 or the equivalent form in the state of issue” is not. That last phrase keeps the clause working in the states that write their own. The endorsement forms, by number lists the rest of what a subcontract normally asks for, so the numbers can be lifted straight into your exhibit.

SUBR WVD is a claim about a form, not the form

Every ACORD 25 carries a SUBR WVD column with a Y/N box on each coverage row. A “Y” means the person who typed that certificate believes a waiver endorsement sits on that policy. It is a report about a document. It is not the document, and it grants nothing.

The form says so about itself, in its own words: the certificate “does not affirmatively or negatively amend, extend or alter the coverage afforded by the policies below.” A tick sitting on top of an endorsement that lapsed at renewal, that names your parent company rather than the entity on the subcontract, or that was never issued at all, looks precisely like a tick sitting on top of a good one. That is the whole reason a certificate proves nothing on its own.

So treat the tick as a pointer, not an answer. It tells you which policies to ask about. The five-minute verification routine covers what else on that form deserves the same suspicion; on this page there is exactly one document that settles the question, and it is the endorsement page.

Blanket wording points back at your own contract

Blanket and scheduled are not two form numbers on the waiver side. On both endorsements the difference is what the carrier puts in the schedule box. A scheduled waiver has a name typed into it — yours, or the project. A blanket waiver names nobody, and the box describes a class instead: any person or organization the insured has agreed in a written contract to waive against. Some carriers print their own blanket wording, but the mechanics are the same, and blanket is what most agents issue.

Blanket is not the weaker of the two. It is the conditional one, so read the condition off the page in front of you rather than assuming it. The GL schedule wording generally turns on a contract executed before the date of the loss; the comp version commonly turns on the written agreement existing at all. So a blanket endorsement grants you nothing if your subcontract never required a waiver, if it was still unsigned when the injury happened, or if it was never countersigned. In each of those cases the certificate prints the same “Y”.

Sign before the crew arrives and the question never comes up. The endorsement points at an agreement it has never seen. So keep the signed subcontract in the folder with it — the pair is the evidence, and one half of it proves very little. The blanket additional insured forms, CG 20 33 and CG 20 38, carry the same written-contract condition, so the same folder usually settles both. What to require before a sub starts is where that clause belongs in your standard terms.

The AIA A201 waiver is a third thing, and it is not on a policy

Most GCs meet this phrase for the first time in an owner's contract rather than on a certificate. If your prime contract is built on the AIA general conditions, A201 carries a mutual waiver of subrogation for property-insurance losses. It was long numbered §11.3.7 in the widely used 2007 edition. The 2017 edition carries it into §11.3 and moves much of the insurance detail out into an exhibit to the owner–contractor agreement.

It works differently from the two endorsements above, and the difference is the useful part. CG 24 04 and WC 00 03 13 are things bought on an insurance policy. The A201 clause is a contract term: owner and contractor waive claims against each other, and against their subcontractors, for damage covered by the builder's risk or other property insurance on the work. No insurer signed it. The parties did, and the property policy is expected to permit it.

Two consequences you can act on. First, an AIA-based prime contract has probably already imposed a waiver on you running toward the owner, whether or not anyone drew your attention to it. Second, it says nothing about your sub's general liability or workers' compensation. So the flow-down clause in your subcontract still has to require those two endorsements by number.

Which edition your contract adopts, and how the owner's attorney amended it, is a question for your own counsel and not one this page can answer. The narrow point stands on its own: an A201 waiver in the prime contract is not evidence of a CG 24 04 on your sub's policy.

What a waiver costs, and what it does not do

The comp waiver is not free, and in a few states it is not available at all — what the forms cost and where they are restricted covers both. The GL waiver is frequently issued at no extra charge, so the pushback you get is almost always about the comp one, and it is usually a reaction to a real premium rather than stalling. What belongs on this page is what to say back, and which answer to accept.

Two things are worth saying back. It is standard on construction subcontracts, and their agent issues these every week. And it does not do the thing subs most often fear: a waiver does not move their [experience modification](/glossary/experience-modification-rate). Claim payments move the mod. The waiver changes only who the insurer may bill afterwards, and carries the premium charge for that change.

This is the limit GCs find out about late. A waiver stops your sub's comp insurer recovering from you what it paid the worker. It does not stop the worker suing you. That claim is theirs to bring, and your own general liability policy is what answers it. Employers liability is what stands behind your sub when you turn round looking for indemnity. The waiver closes one door of the two, and it is worth having for that one.

What can genuinely stop a sub is the carrier rather than the cost. If their agent says the waiver cannot be issued on that policy, that is a real answer rather than a stall — get it from the agent in writing, and then decide whether the job proceeds. At that point it is a commercial decision, not a paperwork one.

Ask the issuing agent, and ask for both

Do not ask your sub for an updated certificate. They will forward the request to the same agency, which will issue the same form with the same tick, and a week will have passed. Ask the issuing agent directly — the agency named in the PRODUCER box in the top-left corner of the certificate — and ask for the endorsement pages by form number.

1. 1Email the agent, copying your sub, so nobody feels gone around.
2. 2Ask by number: CG 24 04 on the general liability, WC 00 03 13 on the workers' compensation — or the state's own waiver form, where the state writes one.
3. 3Name the entity the waiver has to run to, spelled exactly as it appears on your subcontract signature page.
4. 4If a blanket form comes back, read the wording condition and put your signed subcontract in the same folder as the endorsement.
5. 5Diary the earlier of the two policy expiry dates. The endorsement expires with the policy it sits on, so a renewal puts the whole question back on your desk.

One email, sent once, worded so that a fresh certificate cannot come back in place of the pages:

Hi [Agent name],

We're the general contractor on [project]. Our signed subcontract with [Sub name] requires a waiver of subrogation in favor of [Your Company — exact legal name as signed] on both their general liability and their workers' compensation policies.

Could you send the endorsement pages themselves — CG 24 04 on the GL, and WC 00 03 13 or whichever waiver form your state uses on the comp policy — showing the policy number and the effective dates? A blanket “where required by written contract” form is fine. Our subcontract requires the waiver and is signed and countersigned.

If either waiver can't be issued on that policy, please tell us which one and why — we would much rather know now than at claim time.

Please send the endorsement pages rather than a certificate or a confirmation letter. Those pages are the only thing we can file against this requirement.

Thanks,
[Your name]
[Your Company]
[phone]

Then open the attachment. Three things decide whether it is worth anything: the policy number matches the certificate, the effective dates cover your whole scope, and the named party is the entity that signed your subcontract. A page that fails any of the three is a page about a waiver.