What general liability insurance covers

Coverage A pays sums you become legally obligated to pay for injury to a person or damage to property that happens during the policy period and arises from your premises, your operations, your products or your completed work. The trigger is an occurrence, an accident, including continuous exposure to the same harmful condition. Injury to your own employees is excluded here; that belongs to workers' compensation. Damage to property you own, rent or are working on is excluded too, which is why contractors carry separate coverage for the thing they are building.

Once you have handed over the work or the product, a claim that it later caused injury or damage falls under products-completed operations. A deck that collapses a year after the carpenter finished, a bakery's product that sickens a customer, an electrician's wiring that causes a fire: all are completed operations claims, and they are the ones that follow a contractor for years after the job. Some carriers exclude or restrict this coverage for certain trades, and a general contractor's certificate request will usually ask for it by name.

Coverage B pays for offences rather than accidents: libel, slander, wrongful eviction, invasion of privacy, misuse of another company's advertising idea, and infringing a copyright or slogan in your own advertising. It is the part of the policy that responds to a defamation claim over a social media post or a dispute with a former tenant, subject to exclusions for knowing falsehood and for businesses in advertising, publishing and web design, which need a media policy instead.

Coverage C pays small medical bills for a member of the public injured on your premises or by your operations without anyone having to prove you were at fault. It is a goodwill coverage with a low limit per person, meant to settle a sprained ankle before it becomes a lawsuit; it does not apply to employees or to your own household.

The policy carries a per-occurrence limit and an annual general aggregate that caps everything the policy pays in a year, with a separate aggregate for products-completed operations. Contracts ask for both, and they often ask for endorsements: additional insured status for the landlord or general contractor, a waiver of subrogation, and primary and non-contributory wording that puts your policy ahead of theirs. A certificate of insurance is a one-page summary the agency issues to a third party showing your limits and endorsements; it does not change the policy, and we issue them at no charge for the businesses we insure.