LICENSE, INSURANCE & BONDING

More and more people have learned to ask if a contractor is licensed, insured, and bonded. Unfortunately, unless your prospective contractor is licensed through your city, you may not be sure they are showing you a certificate of insurance that is current and up to date. It’s not enough just to have insurance, many contractors will boast coverage as a means of making the sale. The purpose of contractor insurance is to protect you and your family from liability.

While most contractors carry the minimum insurance required by law, this hardly protects you or your home. While Kusiak Construction is only required to carry $100,000 in liability insurance, as you can see, we carry ten times this amount at $1,000,000.This page gives you full transparency of our coverage.

KUSIAK INSURANCE

General Liability Insurance $1,000,000.00 per occurrence with a $2,000,000.00 umbrella policy

Products completed operations insurance $2,000,000.00 coverage

• Provides coverage for faulty work after contractor leaves work site

Worker’s Compensation and Employers’ Liability $100,000.00 per occurrence with a $500,000.00 aggregate

• While this is the most expensive insurance we carry it is absolutely necessary to cover employees for loss of wages, medical treatments, and even death.
• Failure to provide this insurance can put everyone, including homeowner, at risk for expenses resulting from accident or injury.

Automobile Liability

• All company vehicles are covered for $1,000,000.00 per accident.

Insured means that a contractor has purchased insurance products to protect against the risks that come with performing construction and maintenance work. Common risks include property damage, injuries, and workers’ compensation claims.
Bonds typically cover things like the cost of hiring a new contractor to complete a job if the contractor fails to complete the project or paying subcontractors that the contractor did not pay. Insurance usually covers things like liability from injuries sustained on the job or damage to the client’s property.

Most unlicensed contractors do not carry liability and/or workers’ compensation insurance. As a homeowner, you are financially responsible for damage that occurs to your home during construction (example: that new plumbing is faulty and ruins a new $30,000 kitchen and floods your foundation). Lack of workers compensation insurance held by an unlicensed contractor can also mean you’re legally responsible in the event of worker injury or death while working on your project. In the absence of a properly licensed contractor on your job site, the courts typically consider homeowners to be the official “contractor,” fully responsible for legal and financial liability claims.

The entire purpose of contractor licensing is to reduce risk to you, the homeowner. Not just anyone can get a contractor’s license and anyone holding a license has passed examinations and paid fees to obtain it. One huge advantage of licensing is that it allows you to weed out the bad contractors.

When a contractor chooses to be unlicensed, does it not raise questions? Did the contractor let his insurance lapse, preventing them from protecting you and your home? Did this contractor try to pass the licensing exam and fail? Has this unlicensed contractor committed some crime that prevents licensing? If a contractor won’t structure his business properly from the ground up with licensing, what does it say about their integrity and accountability?