A crew locks the van in Pembroke Pines on Friday afternoon and comes back Monday to a cut padlock and an empty cargo bay. Two hammer drills, a laser level, a pipe threader, a generator, and the miter saw that had been on the truck for six years. Replacement cost clears $14,000. The owner calls his agent assuming general liability handles it.
It does not. General liability pays when your work injures someone else or damages someone else's property. Your tools are your property, and a commercial general liability form is not written to pay for them. The commercial auto policy covering the van does not pay either. It insures the vehicle, not the cargo inside it. The coverage that pays for stolen tools is contractors equipment, written on an inland marine form, and a surprising number of licensed Florida contractors have never added it.
Fast check on your declarations page: look for a line reading contractors equipment, tools and equipment, or scheduled equipment floater, with a dollar limit beside it. If the page lists general liability, commercial auto and workers' compensation and nothing else, every tool you own is uninsured the moment it leaves the shop.
General Liability Covers Their Property, Not Yours
A commercial general liability policy answers one question. Did your work injure a third party, or damage a third party's property? If your apprentice drops a sledge through a client's marble countertop in Coral Gables, that is a GL claim. If the same sledge is stolen out of the truck that night, it is not.
- GL pays: a customer trips over your extension cord, a supply line you installed bursts and floods the unit below, a dropped tool dents a parked car.
- GL does not pay: your drills, saws, ladders, compressors, generators, trailers, or the materials staged on the jobsite waiting to be installed.
- GL also does not pay to redo your own defective work, which is a separate argument entirely and catches contractors just as often.
The confusion makes sense, because Florida's licensing rules put general liability front and center. Florida Statute § 489.115(5)(a) makes public liability and property damage insurance a prerequisite to getting or renewing a contractor certificate or registration, with the dollar amounts set by board rule. Rule 61G4-15.003 of the Florida Administrative Code carries those minimums: $300,000 public liability and $50,000 property damage for general and building contractors, and $100,000 public liability and $25,000 property damage for residential, roofing, plumbing, air conditioning, mechanical, pool, sheet metal, underground utility, solar and most specialty licenses.
Read that carefully. The state requires you to insure the damage you cause. It requires nothing at all about the equipment you own. A contractor can hold a clean license for fifteen years in Broward County and never carry a dollar of coverage on his own tools.
The Work Truck Is Insured. What Is Inside It Is Not.
This misunderstanding costs Florida contractors more than any other. Commercial auto covers the van, the box truck and the trailer as vehicles. Collision pays when you hit something. Comprehensive pays when the truck is stolen, burned, vandalized or flooded. None of it extends to the contents.
If a thief takes the whole van, comprehensive pays for the van. The $14,000 of tools inside are a separate loss on a policy you may not own. If the thief pries the side door and leaves the van in the lot, comprehensive pays to fix the door and stops there.
Under Florida Statute § 812.014(2), stolen property worth $750 or more but under $20,000 is grand theft in the third degree, a third-degree felony. That matters for the police report, not for your recovery. Industry theft data puts the recovery rate for stolen heavy equipment at roughly one in five, and for hand tools and small power tools well below one in ten.
What Contractors Equipment Coverage Actually Does
Contractors equipment is an inland marine form, the family of policies built to cover property while it moves. That is the whole point. A commercial property policy covers things at a fixed address. Your tools are on a jobsite in Sunrise on Monday, in the truck on Tuesday and back at the shop on Wednesday, so they need a form that follows them.
Standard perils are theft, fire, vandalism and accidental damage, covered at the jobsite, in transit and in temporary storage. You buy it two ways, and most South Florida trade businesses need both.
Scheduled equipment versus a blanket limit
| Scheduled equipment | Blanket limit | |
|---|---|---|
| How it is written | Each item listed by make, model, serial number and value | One pooled limit covering all unscheduled small tools |
| Best for | Big-ticket machines: excavators, skid steers, boom lifts, trailers, generators above roughly $5,000 | Hand tools and small power tools you buy and replace constantly |
| Claim advantage | Value is agreed up front, so nobody argues about what a 2019 mini excavator was worth | No paperwork when you buy a new impact driver; it is covered the day it goes on the truck |
| Common trap | Forgetting to add the machine you bought in March | A per-item sublimit, often $1,000 to $2,500, capping what any single tool can collect |
Schedule the machines that would stop the business if they vanished. Then carry a blanket limit sized to what is realistically on the truck during your busiest week, not what you remember buying.
Tools, Materials and the Building Are Three Separate Policies
Contractors call after a claim for stolen copper gets denied under a tools policy. The copper was not a tool. Three different inland marine forms cover three different things sitting on the same jobsite, and buying one does not get you the others.
| Coverage | What it insures | Typical trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Contractors equipment | Tools and machinery you own or lease and move from job to job | Van broken into overnight, skid steer taken off the pad, generator destroyed by fire |
| Installation floater | Materials you will install but have not installed yet, from the supplier through transit, storage and staging | Pallet of condensers taken from the site the night before they go in |
| Builders risk | The structure under construction and the materials already incorporated into it | Half-framed house damaged by a named storm before the certificate of occupancy |
Builders risk is usually the owner's or the general contractor's policy. The installation floater is usually yours if you are a sub supplying specialty equipment. The two overlap enough that a carrier will ask who is buying what before it quotes either one.
Five Exclusions That Kill Florida Tool Claims
- Employee theft. Inland marine forms exclude it. Tools that walk off with a crew member belong on a crime policy with employee dishonesty coverage, and that is a separate purchase.
- No visible forced entry. Many forms pay for theft only when there are marks: a cut lock, a pried door, a broken window. An unlocked trailer hitch or an open side door can void the claim outright.
- No documentation. This reduces or denies more tool claims than anything written in the exclusions. If you cannot show what was on the truck, the adjuster pays what you can prove rather than what you lost.
- Actual cash value settlement. Unless you buy replacement cost, a six-year-old miter saw settles at six-year-old value. Across a van of well-used tools the depreciation gap can swallow half the claim.
- Flood and named-storm wording. This is Florida. Read how the form treats wind and water at an open jobsite before hurricane season, not after.
What It Costs, and What Limit to Buy
Tools and equipment insurance is one of the cheaper lines a Florida contractor buys. A blanket limit in the $10,000 to $25,000 range typically adds a few hundred dollars a year when it sits alongside general liability or a business owner's policy. Scheduled heavy equipment prices off the value and type of each machine and costs more. Deductibles commonly land between $500 and $1,000, and raising the deductible on a blanket limit rarely saves enough to be worth it.
Sizing the limit is where contractors get it wrong. Insure what is physically in the truck and on the site on a bad day, not the receipts you can find.
- Walk the van and the trailer with a phone camera and photograph every drawer, bin and rack.
- List anything worth more than roughly $1,000 separately with make, model and serial number, and schedule it.
- Total the rest at replacement cost rather than purchase price, then add tools you rent or borrow if your contract makes you responsible for them.
- Check the per-item sublimit on any blanket quote. A $25,000 blanket with a $1,000 cap per tool will not replace a $4,200 concrete saw.
- Ask whether the form settles at replacement cost or actual cash value, and get that answer in writing.
How Tools Coverage Fits the Rest of a Florida Contractor Policy
Tools coverage is one line on a stack. General liability handles the damage you do to others, and it is what the licensing rule under Florida Statute § 489.115 is asking for. Workers' compensation handles injuries to your crew, and Florida applies a lower employee threshold to construction than to most other industries. Commercial auto handles the vehicles. Contractors equipment handles the tools. For smaller shops a business owner's policy bundles the property and liability pieces, and many carriers will attach a tools and equipment endorsement straight to the BOP instead of writing a standalone inland marine policy.
Our commercial insurance page walks through how those layers fit together for a Broward County or Miami-Dade trade business, with local pricing on each line. This piece is narrower on purpose. You almost certainly carry general liability. You may well carry nothing at all on the $14,000 sitting in the back of your van tonight.
One question worth asking your agent this week: if my truck is broken into tonight in Fort Lauderdale and every tool in it is gone, which policy number do I call, and what is the limit? If the answer takes more than a sentence, the coverage is not there.