How to verify a certificate of insurance

Why this is harder than it looks

The certificate is designed to be reassuring. It is one page, it is on a standard form, it has your company typed into the certificate-holder box, and every row has a number in it. Nothing about it looks like a document that needs auditing. That is exactly the problem: almost everything on it is a summary of something else, and the summary is not what a court, an auditor or your own carrier will look at later.

So verification is really two jobs. First, read the form properly — most problems are visible on the page if you know which four things to look at. Second, get the documents the form is summarizing, because the form itself grants nothing.

The five-minute read

In order, because this order finds the common failures first. If any step fails, stop and go back to the agent — there is no point checking limits on a certificate for the wrong company. That means the subcontractor's agent, the producer named on the form, who is not the same person as your own broker and can produce a document your broker cannot.

1. 1Named insured. Upper-left, below the producer. Does it match the legal entity on your subcontract — exactly, including the LLC or Inc? A sub who operates as two entities will often send whichever certificate they have to hand.
2. 2Dates. Each policy row has an effective and an expiry date. Is every policy in force for the whole period the sub will be on your site? A policy expiring mid-job is not a future problem, it is a today problem — decide now who is chasing the renewal.
3. 3Limits. Compare each row against what your subcontract actually requires, not against a number you remember. This is where per-project aggregate matters: a general aggregate is shared across every job that sub works, so the number on the page may already be partly spent.
4. 4The two Y/N columns. ADDL INSD and SUBR WVD are the only checkboxes on the form, and they are the ones your subcontract turns on. Tick means the agent believes an endorsement exists. It is not the endorsement.
5. 5The description box. Read it. Additional-insured wording, primary and non-contributory language, and project-specific limitations are usually typed in here as free text, and free text is where the qualifiers live.

If you want the form itself explained box by box — including the annotated certificate showing where each of these lives on the page — how to read an ACORD 25 is the page for it.

What the certificate cannot tell you

Four things are invisible on the form, and all four have caught out contractors who did everything the form asked:

• Whether the endorsements exist. The ticks report the agent's understanding. The CG 20 10 / CG 20 37 additional-insured endorsements and the CG 24 04 waiver are separate documents you have to hold.
• Whether coverage is still in force today. A certificate is accurate on the day it was issued. It says nothing about a policy canceled the week after — which is why notice of cancellation reads the way it does, and why the honest answer is to re-verify rather than to trust the promise.
• How much of the aggregate is left. A $2M general aggregate that has already paid $1.5M on another job still prints as $2M. The products and completed operations aggregate on the line beneath it is a separate bucket with the same blind spot.
• Whether the carrier behind it is sound. The insurers block gives you a name and a NAIC number, never a grade — so a subcontract requiring an A- VII carrier is asking for something this form structurally cannot show.
• Whether the policy is occurrence or claims-made. The form has a box for it, and most people never look — but a claims-made policy can stop covering a completed job the moment the sub switches carriers.

Getting the documents that do count

Ask the producer — the agency named in the upper-left box — not the subcontractor. The producer issued the certificate and holds the policy file; the sub usually has neither. Ask for endorsement copies by form number, because a request for ‘proof we are additional insured’ frequently comes back as another certificate.

1. 1Additional insured, ongoing operations — CG 20 10 (or a blanket form in the CG 20 33-38 family).
2. 2Additional insured, completed operations — CG 20 37. Ask for this one explicitly; it is the one most often missing, and it covers the claims that surface after the job ends.
3. 3Waiver of subrogation, general liability — CG 24 04.
4. 4Waiver of subrogation, workers' compensation — WC 00 03 13. A separate endorsement on a separate policy from a different carrier.
5. 5Primary and non-contributory wording — often inside the additional-insured endorsement rather than its own page, so ask where it lives rather than for a form number.

Read what comes back rather than filing it. An additional-insured endorsement will often say it applies only ‘when required by written contract’ — fine, and a reason to make sure your subcontract actually says so. It may also carve out completed operations, or limit itself to a named project.

When something does not check out

Most failures are administrative rather than adversarial: the wrong entity, an expired certificate someone had saved, a missing endorsement nobody asked for. Say specifically what is missing and who has to produce it — ‘your certificate does not show completed-operations additional insured; please have your agent send the CG 20 37’ gets a result, and ‘your insurance is not compliant’ starts an argument.

The one decision worth making in advance, in writing, is what happens when a sub is on site and something lapses. Deciding it in the moment, with a crew already working, is how exceptions become the rule — what to do when a sub's COI expires mid-job covers that case on its own.

Making it repeatable

Verification only protects you if it happens every time, including at renewal — and renewals are where it quietly stops happening, because nobody is standing in front of you asking to start work. Keep the endorsement pages, not just the certificates, and keep them somewhere you can find them on the day someone asks — which, more often than a claim, is your own carrier's auditor.

If you are doing this by hand, our free tracking template has a column for each endorsement rather than one ‘compliant?’ cell, which is the distinction this whole page turns on.