Coverage
No board in these five states requires it. Your contracts will, and their number is the one that counts.
Excess liability sits above the general liability and the commercial auto, and it is the clearest example of a line that statute has nothing to say about. Not one of the five licensing boards requires it. What requires it is the general contractor agreement, the owner, the public works bid package or the lender — and their requirement routinely sits at five to twenty times the state licensing floor.
The same line, governed five different ways. Each state page publishes the sources behind these figures.
CSLB has no excess requirement — the license rests on a $25,000 bond. Demand comes from contract, and California’s construction-defect exposure on residential work is what pushes residential contractors into an excess layer earlier than their revenue alone would suggest.
All California requirements →The CCB already sets real primary limits by endorsement, up to $2,000,000 aggregate for a commercial general contractor level 1. Excess is what covers the distance between that endorsement limit and a project requirement that exceeds it — which on larger commercial work it regularly does.
All Oregon requirements →The widest gap of the five. L&I registration is satisfied at $200,000/$50,000, while a commercial GC agreement in the Puget Sound market will commonly ask for $1,000,000 primary plus several million excess. In Washington the excess layer is doing almost all of the real work.
All Washington requirements →The residential licensing floor is $100,000 general liability, so the excess tower carries essentially the whole meaningful limit on any project of size. Louisiana’s litigation environment makes the distance between the licensing floor and a defensible limit larger here than the raw numbers suggest.
All Louisiana requirements →With no general liability requirement at the ROC at all, there is no statutory floor for excess to sit above — the contract sets the entire structure, primary and excess together. Arizona is the purest case in this program of a limit driven wholly by who you are contracting with.
All Arizona requirements →Tell us the trade, the state and the payroll. We will tell you which markets fit before we submit anywhere.
