Florida Roofing Contractor Insurance

A Fort Lauderdale roofer tears off half a flat roof on a Tuesday, tarps it, and goes home. An afternoon cell dumps two inches of rain through the opening and ruins the ceilings, the drywall and a server closet. He files on his general liability policy and gets a denial letter, because his form excludes water damage from an open roof condition.

That claim was not unlucky. It was uninsured, and he could have read it on page 14 of the policy he bought nine months earlier. Roofing is the hardest trade in Florida to insure, and the premium is only half the problem. The other half is what the cheap policy leaves out, which is usually the exact work your crews do every day.

Workers' Comp Starts at Your First Employee

Most Florida business owners have heard that workers' compensation kicks in at four employees. That is true for almost every industry except yours. Florida Statute § 440.02(20)(b)2 covers "all private employments in which four or more employees are employed by the same employer," and then separately covers, "with respect to the construction industry, all private employment in which one or more employees are employed by the same employer."

One employee. Hire a single helper in Sunrise and you need a policy before he climbs a ladder. Roofing sits squarely inside the statutory definition of the construction industry in § 440.02(10), so there is no argument to make about whether a tear-off counts as construction.

Corporate officers can elect out, but the exemption is narrow. Under § 440.02(18)(b)2, no more than three officers of a corporation or group of affiliated corporations may elect to be exempt, and each has to be a shareholder owning at least 10 percent of the stock. Three exempt officers and a crew of six is not a compliant shop. It is a shop with six uninsured employees.

An officer exemption covers the officer. It does nothing for your crew, and it does nothing for the subcontractor crews working under your contract.

The 2026 Rate Cut Barely Touches Roofing

On 17 November 2025, Florida Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky approved a statewide overall workers' compensation rate decrease of 6.9 percent for policies written on or after 1 January 2026. The Office of Insurance Regulation called it the ninth consecutive year of decreases. NCCI filed for it on the back of falling lost-time claim frequency in policy years 2022 and 2023.

Here is what that means for a roofer. The 6.9 percent is a statewide average across every class code. Roofing carries one of the highest rates in the entire Florida class table, several times what a carpentry or an office clerical class pays, because the loss experience behind it is falls from height. A percentage cut off a very large number is still a very large number.

Do not price a renewal off a published class rate you found online. The rate tables that circulate for roofing in Florida disagree with each other by a factor of four, and the number that actually matters is your filed rate multiplied by your experience modification, then adjusted by whatever schedule credits or debits the carrier applies. Ask for the rate and the mod in writing, and ask what drove the mod.

The mod is the lever you control. Two roofers in Broward County with identical payroll can be 40 percent apart on premium because one of them documented a fall protection program, ran a return-to-work process and closed its claims quickly. Our workers' compensation page explains how the experience modification is built and what moves it.

What Your General Liability Policy Will Not Cover

Florida Statute § 489.115(5) requires every certified or registered contractor to carry public liability and property damage insurance "for the safety and welfare of the public," in amounts set by rule of the Construction Industry Licensing Board rather than written into the statute. The board rule is commonly cited at $100,000 public liability and $25,000 property damage for roofing, against $300,000 and $50,000 for general and building contractors. Verify your own category against the current rule before you renew, because the figures have been amended over the years.

Those license minimums are nearly irrelevant in practice. A property manager in Miami will demand $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate before you set foot on the building, and a commercial general contractor will often want more plus additional insured status and a waiver of subrogation. The license number is a floor nobody builds on.

What matters far more is the exclusion page. These four carve-outs show up on roofing forms constantly, and each one maps to a job you probably ran last month:

• Hot work and torch-down. Many forms exclude open-flame work outright. Others allow it only with a written hot work permit process and a fire watch that stays on site for a set period after the torch is cold. If you run modified bitumen or hot mop and your policy excludes hot work, your largest fire exposure is uninsured.
• Height limitations. These are frequently buried in the classification wording rather than printed as a labeled exclusion. A form written for residential shingle work can quietly stop applying above two or three stories.
• Open roof and resulting water damage. The single most common roofing claim in South Florida, and routinely excluded. Read whether rain entering a structure you have opened is covered, and under what tarping conditions.
• Your work and faulty workmanship. General liability is not a warranty. A leak caused by your own installation is usually excluded, while the resulting damage to the owner's property may be covered. The distinction decides whether a callback costs you a crew day or a lawsuit.

Premiums for roofing general liability in Florida run across a very wide band. Published figures range from roughly $2,500 a year for a small one-crew shingle operation to $8,000 and well past $25,000 for an established company with commercial flat work and real revenue. Revenue, claims history, work mix and whether you sub out labor move that number more than carrier shopping does.

Most Florida Roofers End Up in Surplus Lines

Admitted carriers have spent years walking away from Florida roofing operations. What is left for most shops is the surplus lines market, which exists precisely to write risks the admitted market declines. That is normal and it is not a red flag. It does change two things you need to understand.

First, a surplus lines insurer is not backed by the Florida Insurance Guaranty Association. If an admitted carrier fails, the guaranty fund steps in behind its claims. If a surplus lines carrier fails, there is no state backstop, so the financial strength rating on the paper is doing real work. Ask for it.

Second, surplus lines forms are not standardized. Two policies at the same price can differ enormously in what they exclude, and the carrier can manuscript endorsements on a single risk. Comparing two roofing quotes on premium alone is close to meaningless. Compare the exclusion pages side by side, and get any hot work or height endorsement in writing before you bind.

Every Sub You Hire Is Your Workers' Comp Problem

This is the one that ends roofing companies. Florida Statute § 440.10(1)(b) makes a contractor who sublets work "liable for, and shall secure, the payment of compensation to all such employees," with one exception: "except to employees of a subcontractor who has secured such payment." Subsection (1)(c) then requires that "a contractor shall require a subcontractor to provide evidence of workers' compensation insurance."

Read those together. Your uninsured sub's employee who falls off a roof in Plantation becomes your workers' compensation claim, on your policy, charged against your experience modification for three years. The certificate of insurance is not paperwork for the file. It is the only thing standing between you and that claim.

Collect a certificate from every sub before the first day of work, not after. Confirm the policy period actually covers your job dates, confirm there is no officer-exemption-only arrangement hiding behind it, and ask to be notified on cancellation. Then budget for the audit: your carrier will treat payroll paid to uninsured subs as your own payroll at the roofing rate, and that premium bill arrives after the job is already closed out.

The Deductible Rule That Costs $10,000 a Violation

Florida Statute § 489.147 bars a contractor from offering a homeowner "a rebate, gift, gift card, cash, coupon, or waiver of any insurance deductible" in exchange for an inspection or for filing a roof damage claim. Violations carry disciplinary proceedings and a fine of up to $10,000 per violation.

"We'll cover your deductible" is still a standard pitch at South Florida front doors. It is a licensing exposure, not an insurance one, which means no policy you buy will pay that fine for you. The same statute requires specific disclosure language in advertisements that solicit roof damage claims, including a statement that the consumer is responsible for the deductible. Have a licensing attorney review your door-knocking scripts and mailers if you have not already.

Building a Program That Survives the Audit

A Florida roofing program that actually holds up has five parts: general liability written for your real work mix, workers' compensation priced off a mod you have worked on, commercial auto covering both company trucks and the personal vehicles your crews drive to jobs, inland marine for tools and staged materials, and an excess layer sized to your largest contract requirement rather than to your smallest.

Buy them as a program rather than one line at a time. Gaps live in the seams between separately shopped policies, and the roofing-specific markets that write the hard lines usually want the whole account. Our commercial insurance page walks through how these coverages fit together for South Florida trades, and the contractor insurance guide below goes deeper on cost.

The roofer in Fort Lauderdale with the ruined server closet now carries a form that covers open roof water damage, with a tarping condition his foremen follow. It cost him about 11 percent more a year. He found out the expensive way that in roofing, the exclusion page is the policy. Pull yours out this week and read it against your last ten jobs.